Home Is Where The Heart Is
by DavidB226Morris
Summary: What if it the freighter that came at the end of Season 3 really was Penny's boat? What if more people were rescued than just the Oceanic 6? Is it possible that the survivors of 815 could've returned to face real problems that were more banal than those of a mystical island, but no less troubling?
1. Prologue

**Home Is Where The Heart Is**

 **A Lost/Grey's Anatomy crossover**

 **By DavidB226Morris**

Summary: What if it the freighter that came at the end of Season 3 really _was_ Penny's boat? What if more people were rescued than just the Oceanic 6? Is it possible that the survivors of 815 could've returned to face real problems that were more banal than those of a mystical island, but no less troubling? How would they deal with it? How would Jack deal with it?

Disclaimer: Jack Shephard, Hurley, and all the other survivors don't belong to me. (If they had, believe me, they wouldn't have had to die to make a place together.) Rather they are the property of Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, J.J. Abrams, and the rest of the people at Bad Robot productions. Addison Montgomery, Derek Shepherd and the rest of the people at Seattle Grace don't belong to me either. They are the property of She-who-must-not-be named, Shonda Rhimes and the rest of the people at Shondaland. I'm just borrowing all of them, so I give them a better ending. Hopefully, with a lot less people dying.

Author's Note: This is going to take a bit so bare with me. This fanfic isn't entirely my idea.. Red Bess Beckham at fanfiction. net came up with the basic structure of this crossover first in Hanging by a Gossamer Thread- having the people at Oceanic rescued, and going back to normal lives. Except for Jack, who ended up so devastated by his break-up with Kate that he finally decided to make a change and move to Seattle to try and start over. (I won't give away more details, because its a great fanfic and it should be read on its own.)

This fanfiction will have similar ideas to it, but there will be some critical differences. First of all, while that fanfiction focused mostly on Jack, I intend to deal with the majority of the other survivors as well. In that sense, this will be another _Lost_ fanfic where they get rescued. They will have to deal with a variety of problems, none of which include Ben Linus, Charles Widmore or Jacob. That doesn't mean they aren't going to be any more troubling, but if you enjoyed the more supernatural aspects of the show, you probably are reading the wrong story.

Secondly, I have far more issues with the way _Grey's Anatomy_ has been run, and they started _way_ before Rhimes starting killing off characters like she was on _Game of Thrones._ That said, there were some good ideas on the series the first four years the show were on the air, so I'm going to write this fanfiction trying to embrace some of the strengths of the series instead of its weaknesses. And in keeping with Red Bess, Addison will be staying at Seattle Grace instead of moving to California. That is by far the most significant change to the timeline. The majority of the action will be taking place in a _slightly_ alternate Season 4. I will do my best not to do any character bashing, but no promises, cause frankly, Rhimes made them do some stupid things.

Final statement: I have no more medical expertise than the average television viewer of hospital dramas. Nevertheless, I feel that this story is going to need some medical emergencies in order for it to work. Please forgive me if some of the procedures I describe sound unrealistic, but I'm a writer, not a doctor.

Let's begin. See you on the other side.

Rating: Despite the sex that proliferated the latter show, I feel pretty safe in saying that the rating will never go much above T for teens. Sorry to disappoint those of you who watched either show for that reason.

 **PROLOGUE**

 **December 31, 2004**

 **Middle of the Pacific**

The time to start making decisions had come, and as had been the case for much of the past hundred days, everybody was looking to him.

Now that the worst of it finally seemed to be behind them, Jack Shephard was finally starting to realize something: he'd been a terrible leader. He had never wanted to be the one to make all the decisions, but somehow that title had been thrust upon him, yet ever since he had come out of the wreckage of Oceanic 815, everybody had looked to him. And he had done a shitty job.

He had spent nearly three weeks arguing that pushing a button in a bunker had nothing to do with the end of the world, but based on what Hurley and Desmond had told him, there had been a very real chance that they had just barely avoiding some kind of catastrophe. He had thought that he could trust Benjamin Linus, a man who had spent over a week lying to their faces that he would get him off the island, but Juliet seemed convinced that he had never been willing to go through with it. And the fact was, even without those crises, a lot of people that had trusted him to save them all had ended up dying under his leadership.

Now, in less than two days according to Penny, they were going to be landing in Fiji. And when they did, the world was going to want to know just how thirty-five people had survived an airplane crash that had turned up in the Sunda Trench just a few weeks ago with all its passengers confirmed dead. And even though they weren't on the island anymore, everybody was still looking to Jack.

"Happy New Year."

Even though they were no longer in the middle of the jungle, Kate's ability to sneak up on Jack was still considerable. "Is it midnight already?" he asked.

"Hard to tell in international waters. Still, considering we never did much when it came to holidays before..."

"I don't know," Jack admitted. "A week ago, we got the best Christmas gift ever. Not really going to complain if Santa doesn't bring me a BB gun next year."

Kate smiled at this. "Hurley and Sayid are still arguing."

Jack turned. "Same thing?"

"They're probably going to keep chewing this out unless you settle it."

"I was just starting to get used to not having to make decisions anymore." Jack pointed out. "Can we just act like a democracy for once?"

"We never exactly were on the island, and you know it."

By comparison to everything else that was going on, this decision should've been easier. At least Locke wasn't going to get in their way any more.

 _Locke._ For almost every day he'd been on that island, he and Locke had been at opposite ends on almost every decision. Near the end, after Locke had killed Naomi, he'd really thought that the man had finally proved just how insane he was. No one knew where he'd gone when Jack had finally connected with the freighter, and no one had particularly wanted to find him again. Maybe he and Ben were off somewhere trying to fight over leadership of the Others. All Jack knew for sure was that he was relieved that he was never going to have to deal with him again

"All right," he said finally. "But I'm telling you now, this is the last time I'm ever going to weigh in on this kind of thing. "

He desperately hoped this was true.

"Look, I'm just saying, I don't understand why we have to lie about it." Hurley had been the most easy going guy on the island, the one nobody ever had a problem with, but when something important came up, he could be a dog with a bone.

"We're already going to have a lot of trouble explaining how we're not dead when the world thinks we are." Sayid said as calmly as he could manage. "If we come out with a story that sounds out of a children's book, they're going to think we still are."

"I'm not saying that it wasn't weird," Hurley doggedly struggled on.

"Which part, Hugo? The part where a giant smoke monster tears people limb from limb or where if you don't push a button every 108 minutes, the world ends?" Sawyer wasn't using nicknames any more, and yet he still sounded more mocking then ever.

"I saw the same things you did, Hugo," Sayid was actually sounding a little more forgiving now, "And I have no idea how to rationalize it."

Hurley looked around, focusing on Claire and Jin this time. "If we all tell the same story, they can't think we're all lying."

"I'm pretty sure the term for that is 'Stockholm Syndrome," Jack finally weighed in. "Hurley, when we turn up, we're going to have to answer a lot of questions. Probably over and over again. You really want us to have to tell them to psychiatrists?"

Jack had carefully avoided using the word 'crazy' because he knew enough about Hurley that he was very sensitive about that particular word. The look on his face, though, said that it was still a very sensitive subject to him.

Hurley looked like he was about to give up, but then he finally he turned to Juliet. "You were on that island longer than any of us," he pointed out. "Can't you tell people what happened?"

Juliet had always tried to keep a cheerful front up for as long as Jack had known here. Now, however, that she was finally on her way back home, that front seemed to have utterly collapsed. "I didn't stay there because it was a special place," she told Hurley. "I thought that I was there to do scientific research that would make me set for life. Instead, I watched nine women die in three years, and that bastard kept me there like I was some kind of prisoner. That island was hell, Hugo. And frankly, I don't want to answer any questions about it ever again."

Even though Jack completely agreed with Juliet, seeing Hurley look so defeated hurt him- like everybody else, he hated seeing Hugo look so sad. "Look Hurley, no one's saying you have to keep it a complete secret. You want to tell your parents or your friends what happened, I really don't think that would do any harm. But right now, I just want to go home, and put all this madness behind me. And I think we all feel the same way."

Jack didn't really think that he was speaking for the whole group again, but he could tell that almost everybody who was saved felt the same way. Even Hurley did, probably. All of them wanted to leave behind the madness of having to catch their own food, watching their friends get killed by the Others, of having to deal with the imploring from Ben and Locke that the island needed to be protected, that this was their destiny. Frankly, he had hoped that he never heard that word ever again.

What Jack didn't know was that free will could be a fickle bitch itself.

 **July 28, 2005**

 **LOS ANGELES**

Despite all the news coverage that had inevitably come the minute they had resurfaced, despite his best efforts, Jack had been hearing the words of Ben Linus in his head far more often then he had wanted.

" _Why do you want to go back so badly? Your father's dead, your ex-wife's moved on. Do you need to go back to the hospital, start fixing things again?"_

His response to this speech was to beat Ben so badly, his knuckles had bloodied. But now that he was back in 'the real world', on more than one occasion he had wondered what he had come back for.

There had been a fair amount of joy in the air when the Oceanics had reappeared on January 2. There had been rejoicing, celebrations, teary reunions- and everybody had been happy. Sayid had been reunited with a woman he had spent eight years searching for. Claire had made up with her aunt whom she'd been estranged from for months. Juliet had been reunited with her sister and her niece. Everything had been rosy. For two months.

Jack had wanted to hope that things would work out with Kate. That somehow all of the problems that had bothered them when they were on the island would no longer be an issue. But he had seemed to have forgotten the one key problem that he had learned about her the day after the crash.

Unfortunately, neither had the rest of the world. Almost all of them had had family waiting for them when they arrived in Hawaii- but Kate's mother hadn't shown up at all. She had told her that her mother had been severely ill the last time she had seen here, but Kate had never been a very good liar. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway. A few months afterwards, a diligent reporter had talked to the U.S. Marshals about one of the passengers who had been found dead. It took them less than twenty-four hours to find out who he was escorting and why.

It would have taken an attorney with a heart made out of coal to basically decide to prosecute a woman who was one of the biggest celebrities in the world. But this was Los Angeles, and it was an election year. One week after the story was aired, D.A. Melissa Glazebrook ordered the arrest warrant on Kate to be carried out.

The DA had acted too late. The night before, Kate had called Jack and told him that she couldn't go to jail. Jack knew enough from Sawyer to know that all she ever did was run, and that nothing could persuade her otherwise.

He had tried anyway. "Kate, no jury in the world is going to convict you. "

"She doesn't care about me," Kate had said. "All she wants to do in punish me for killing him." They both knew she wasn't talking about the DA.

By now, Jack knew enough about the circumstances around Wayne Jansen's death to know that what Kate had done was neither selfish nor immoral, even if it was criminal. "You'll finally get a chance to tell your side of the story," he implored her. "Everything that you did afterward is understandable from that point on. "

"I can't go to jail, Jack," By now, it sounded like she was crying.

"You were already in one. I think you can survive it."

They had argued for another ten minutes, but Jack knew early on that he was fighting a losing battle. She had hung up, and then she was gone. You wouldn't have fought a woman who was had one of the most recognized faces on the planet would have been able to disappear without a trace, but somehow she did. Every few weeks, there would be tales of a sighting of her, but for all intents and purposes, Kate Austen had disappeared again.

The last few months had been very difficult for Jack. He had been drinking a fair amount before he came to the island, but his drinking had gotten to the point where even he knew he was on the borderline of becoming like his father. Almost everybody from the group had kept touch with him- even Claire and Sun & Jin, who had decided to return home after the rescue- but he had not made it easy for them to talk, most of the time it had just been to painful.

Not even his mother had known about how his relationship with Kate had been, so for once, his decision to keep everything inside had benefited him a little- no one at the hospital had asked him why he was so much more morose since he had come back; they just assumed it was PTSD. The irony was, they were right: they just didn't know the cause of the trauma.

And in a couple of months, it would start all over again. He knew that the excitement over what had happened had mostly died down, but in a little while, they would be coming up on the anniversary of the crash. All the media would start searching for them again. They wouldn't even have to look that hard. And the saga of Kate would be a big part of it. He just couldn't go through with it again. But he didn't have the energy to do anything else.

Oddly enough, it was Sun who managed to snap him out of his funk when she called him for the first time after giving birth. After a few minutes of small talk, it became clear that Sun could read him across the Pacific.

"I got a call from Hurley a couple of days ago," she told him flatly. "He says you stopped returning his calls for the past two weeks. Now, I understand why you might have some problems keeping up with the rest of us, but come on Jack, Hugo deserves better."

It might have been a low blow, but it was admittedly one he deserved.

"Jack, Kate was my friend, too. And I know what it feels like when the person you love is gone."

There was truth in that, too. "I don't know what to do, Sun. I mean, I had a lot of problems before that plane ever crashed, But somehow, this just seems worse. It would be one thing if I were afraid, I know how to deal with that, but I've never been good at letting go."

There was a hesitation on the other end. "Jin and I may be leaving Seoul soon," she told him slowly.

"I thought you wanted to live with your family."

"My family is part of the problem," she said slowly. "A couple of months ago, I had a huge fight with my father. We haven't spoken for awhile."

"I- I had no idea," Jack said, stunned.

"We kept a lot of secrets on the island," she reminded him. "We've been living with Jin's father for the last few weeks. Now that Ji Yeon is here, we are running out of reasons to stay. Far too many bad memories."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that maybe you need to move, too. Find a new place. Preferably, somewhere in the continental United States. Seriously, Jack, you're a skilled spinal surgeon. You can't tell me that there isn't a hospital in the country that wouldn't be willing to pay through the nose to have you work for them?"

It would be a way to get the fresh start that he promised everyone else Why was he always putting his needs last, even though there was no one left?

"You thinking of moving to America?" he asked.

"I don't know," she told him. "Flying is not something that I'm looking forward to. But maybe."

"I probably won't be in LA when you come."

"That's not going to be a factor."

Jack spent the next couple of weeks giving notice at Saint Sebastian. No one would say it aloud, but he could tell that there was a certain amount of relief that he'd done it- the Shephard name had done a lot more harm than good to the hospital the last few years. They were more than willing to put together a good series of recommendations for him, however.

He then began to put together his resume to the various hospitals in the country. Considering how good his reputation as a surgeon had been before he had gotten on Oceanic 815, he wasn't that surprised that there were a lot of them. Money turned out not to be a big factor in the decision. Neither, surprisingly, did distance - he didn't think that going cross-country was going to do much more good if going halfway around the world hadn't helped him get away from most of his issues.

So, for once in his life, he made a compromise, and just went somewhere to get a new start.


	2. Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

SEATTLE GRACE

One Month Later

Addison Montgomery was beginning to think that she'd made a huge mistake staying at the hospital that both her ex-husband and the man she'd ruined her marriage for were now attendings.

It wasn't just the fact that she'd been passed over for the chief of staff position- then again, considering that Richard Weber had decided to stay on pretty much negated that slight. It wasn't that Alex Karev had decided, after their little tumble in the sheets, that he had no desire to be yet another intern having an affair with his attending- which was a surprisingly mature decision coming from him. Hell, it wasn't even that her husband, having literally moved across the country to get away from her, now didn't seem even interested in carrying on the relationship that had broken up their marriage the second time.

It was all of these, and none of these. Her life seemed to be stuck in neutral for the last few months. She seemed to be in the pattern of going from one man to the next. God help her, she had considering going into private practice in LA because she had kissed a man she hardly knew in an elevator. All she seemed to do was run away- she had run away from Derek, she'd run away from Mark, it was time to stop running, and try staying in place for awhile.

She knew that the hospital had been in a state of transition recently. Finals had just taken place for the first years. Weber had announced Callie as chief resident instead of Miranda, Burke had left Christina at the altar, and had left the hospital a day later for parts unknown, and the new crop of interns had just shown up at the hospital. She wasn't the only one whose life was in flux at the moment.

She needed to find a way to get back to balance. Be the doctor who was one of the best neonatal surgeons in the country. And that started with taking a break from men in general, and two attendings in particular.

Addison was still considering all this when she was paged by Weber. She had an idea what it was about. Given the level of turnover that last couple of weeks, the Chief had been trying rather frantically to fill the vacancies. She'd heard from a couple of nurses that there had been more than a few people coming for interviews, and Richard did have something of a flair for the dramatic.

When she got to the conference room, all of the attendings were there along with Callie. She admired her boss' restraint; his habit of handling his last couple of hires had been for them to show up at the hospital floor.

"Everyone, I realize all of you have busy schedules, so I'll make this as brief as possible." Weber began slowly. "As you are all aware, we've been experienced a fair amount of turnover what with Dr. Burke resigning and Dr. Matheson retiring from the head of spinal surgeries. Considering the amount of prestige both brought to their fields, neither will be easy to replace."

"Especially Matheson, I think he was operating before they had X-rays," Derek said under his breath.

"Nevertheless, we move forward. So, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome to Seattle Grace our new head of cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. Erica Hahn," The blonde, thirtyish doctor emerged. The reception sounded enthusiastic, but Addison knew that there was still some half-heartedness to it. Some people still blamed her for what had happened with Burke for some reason.

"And joining us from Los Angeles, as the new chief spinal surgeon, Jack Shephard."

Several thoughts crossed Addison's mind as the new head of spinal surgery came out. The first was, even though she'd never seen the man before, he still looked vaguely familiar. The second was, why did Richard hire another Shepherd for this hospital wasn't one enough. The third was, he's easy on the eyes.

The last was: _Not again._

If you were a resident at one of the top five hospitals in America, one thing you absolutely did not have was any spare time at all. If you weren't trying to get into every surgery possible, picking up scut work in the ER, working on every trauma cases or trying to study for upcoming exams, you were at home crashing for the few vital hours of sleep they need to survive. Watching TV, reading the paper, going online for anything other than medical journals was pretty much out of the question.

So none of the residents of Seattle Grace knew much about current events. They had been vaguely aware of the most recent election cycle but would be hard pressed to remember which way Washington had gone. They had no idea what team had won the World Series. And they had no idea that Oceanic 815 had crashed, much less the story of the survivors emerging from the Pacific the week of New Year's Day.

That did not mean, however, that they hadn't heard of Dr. Jack Shephard.

"Guy's a rock star," Alex was saying as they gathered for their customary lunch around 'Coma Guy'. "AMA has him ranked as the sixth best spinal surgeon in the country."

"Three years ago, a woman came into St. Sebastian's Emergency Room from a major bender," Christina Yang was telling them. "Her L4 vertebrae was nearly smashed. She had no chance of ever walking again. 12 hours under his knife, she's walking again two months later."

Meredith Grey looked at her best friend. "It's a little scary that you have all this memorized." she told her.

"Yeah, I thought you were strictly cardio, Yang."

Christina looked at Alex with disdain- or maybe it was just her normal sour demeanor. "I'm interested in any procedure that creates a medical miracle. Besides, I like knowing who's going to be bossing us around."

"I just don't understand why they hired another doctor named Shephard." George spoke up. "I mean, I know he spells it differently, but there's going to be a hell of a mess when it comes to figuring out who's scrubbing in where."

"Are you saying that the RN's here are illiterate?"

George flushed a little at that. It was a surprisingly snide thing to say, but considering that he was considering the possibility that he had cheated on his wife, he was having trouble keeping himself balanced.

"It's Shephard with an A. Can't you keep track of anything, George?"

Meredith paused for a moment. "Shephard. Like Dr. Christian Shephard?"

"Friend of the family, Meredith?" George was eager to change the subject away from him.

"My mom talked about him more than once. Said that he was one of the best surgeons she'd ever worked with. She was a little surprised that his son went into the same field."

"And I guess that someone like you would know all about family pressure."

The look on the face of everybody jumping in unison was, frankly, one of the funniest things Jack had seen in a long time. He'd wanted to get to know the residents that he was going to be working closely with over the next several months, and Miranda had been more than willing to tell them that they had been known to occasionally grab lunch in the long-term care ward. She'd even offered to show him where it was, just to see the looks on their faces when they were caught doing something that was, frankly, one of the tackier things for doctors to do. But Jack already had received a warm welcome from most of the attendings; now he wanted to see what the rank and file thought of him.

"I've been out of circulation for awhile," Jack said slowly, "but I'm not going to lie and tell you I've never heard of Ellis Grey. While I never met the woman personally, my father did on more than one occasion." He paused. "The words he used to describe her would've made a gang-banger blush. "

Meredith winced a little at this. Her mother had never been one to mince words herself.

"I don't think anybody in this hospital should be judged on who their parents are." He picked his next words very carefully. "Any more than they should based on who they've slept with."

All of them looked very uncomfortable, except for Yang, who didn't seem to give a damn. "Why exactly are you here, Dr. Shephard? This patient doesn't have a spinal injury."

"No, but it is procedure to a neuro check every day. And since none of you can be bothered to get your heads out of your chicken salad, pardon me."

Once again, it was clear Jack had the measure of the so-called doctors; everybody jumped their feet in order to support their resident. Because Izzie, who had been remarkably quiet during the entire discussion about him, was closest to the patient's head, she began doing the vitals first. Within a minute they had a complete report.

" You are aware that patients in comas have some situational awareness? You think that Lloyd Simmons isn't going to be royally pissed about hearing all the details of your surgeries and your love lives, all done in front of somebody who isn't able to answer back?"

"He's been in a coma for the last six months. There's been no neural or physical activity in all time," Alex told them.

"Which you would know because you've been providing him with the most detailed treatment available. I look forward to reading the charts you've prepared for him over that time."

"Rounds are in thirty minutes, Dr. Shephard."

"Dr. Torres said that I could scrub in on a bone graft!"

"Well, maybe you should've considered all that before you decide to invite Mr. Simmons to lunch and not give him anything but his IV." Shephard told them. "And for future reference, there's a perfectly good cafeteria on the third floor. I suggest you eat there from now on. I catch any of you eating in front of another coma patient, you will spend the remainder of the day giving me the most complete report possible."

Reluctantly, all of them got out of their as rapidly as they could. However, when George passed by, Jack spoke up: "Mr. O'Malley, I believe you're still an intern."

"Yes, sir."

"Obviously, I can't bring down the hammer the same way that I can everyone else in the room." Jack said slowly. "Stay behind."

The other doctors exchanged a mutual _oh shit_ look before they headed out.

"Admittedly, I'm still playing catch up, but I believe you failed your first year exam." Jack told him.

There was no point in trying to hide it. "That's right."

"So, now you're stuck back at square one while all of your friends have gone up a peg." Jack paused. "That must truly suck for you."

George was puzzled at this, and it took a moment to realize why. With all the shit that had been flying around, personal mess included, no one with the possible exception of Lexie Grey had offered him the slightest amount of sympathy for his situation. Not even Izzie. That was the way it worked in surgical medicine; those who couldn't move forward got left behind.

"I've been having a rough few months," he admitted.

"So Dr. Bailey tells me. Your father died three months ago in this very hospital. I'm truly sorry for your loss."

"Why? You didn't know him." George told him.

"My father's dead, too. About a year ago."

George tried not to wince at his harshness. The last thing he needed on top of everything else was to piss off the newest attending. "Sorry, I didn't know, sir."

Jack tried not to show how relieved he was to hear that; it was another sign that nobody in Seattle Grace knew who he really was. " I never got along very well with my father. He was a sonofabitch, and honestly, I was never sure if he ever even respected me as a doctor. From what the other attendings tell me, your father did."

George considered this. "He did. More than I ever knew."

Jack didn't know why he was opening up like this to a complete stranger, much less someone who he was going to have to give a lot of orders to in the weeks and months ahead. Maybe it was because he felt that he had to talk to someone about what he was feeling, even if he had to sandwich inside a lie. "Had you given any thought to your specialty over the last year?" Better to change the subject to something safer.

Considering all the shit that he had gone through over the last year- hell, the shit that he had gone through over the last month- George was a little surprised to realize that he had never even considered the subject seriously. All of his fellow residents had more or less settled on specialties by now, but he'd been so busy bouncing from problem to problem that what should've been the most obvious choice had been regulated to the backburner. "I was thinking of going into trauma surgery, but I guess I've been waiting for the right option to hit me."

"Well, that may be the one good thing of having to repeat your first year," Jack told him. "You have more time to think about it. Make certain the choice you make is the right one."

"I honestly never thought of it that way, sir."

"Well, while you're thinking it over, you can start by scrubbing in on some exploratory surgery this afternoon."

George looked up at this. "You're serious?"

"It's my first surgery at Seattle Grace. And I can't think of anyone better to observe than someone who's seen the more of this hospital than any other intern here." Jack smiled. "Don't get me wrong. You're going to being doing most of the scut work before the OR clears in two hours, but I have a feeling that you are more than up to the challenge."

For the first time in nearly a week, George wasn't thinking about the mess he was in with Callie and Izzie. "I'll get right on it, sir."

"And remember, Dr. O'Malley, it's Shephard with an 'A'"

LOS ANGELES

"Wasn't easy finding this kid, even with the information you were able to give me." Tom Frainey told his client. "New York's a big city after all. He's living with his maternal grandmother. Her name is Starletta Johnson. Kid's going to school under than name."

Frainey handed one of the pictures he had. "Kid's getting big," Hurley said to himself.

"Excuse me, Mr. Reyes?"

"Nothing. You haven't made contact with him yet, have you?"

"Per your instructions, my people have only been tailing him." The private investigator paused. "I've been doing this a long time, and I don't even know if I should mention it to you, but there something weird about this boy."

"What do you mean?"

"My people are nearly as good at this as I am. They know how to tail somebody without being seen. But this eleven-year old kid, it's like he knew we were there. Most of the time they were more than a quarter mile away, but he kept looking right at us. One of my guys begged off, even with the money you were paying us."

"Walt always was kind of special," Hurley looked around. "Keep an eye on him for now. In a few days, I'm going fly out and talk with him myself."

"Mr. Reyes, I normally don't ask these kind of questions, but considering the effort it took to find him, I'm a little curious. Why do you want to find this kid so badly?"

"He was a friend," Hurley shifted his eyes a little. "And I owe him $94, 000."

Frainey decided he would've been better off not asking any more question. "As to the rest of our business, we still haven't had much luck locating the boy's father."

Hurley was surprised. "He's not living with his son?"

"Doesn't look that way. A month of searching doesn't seem to have done us any good: there's no sign that he's used any credit cards, and he doesn't seem to be staying in his old apartment any more."

Now Hurley was a little confused. He had every reason in the world to hate Michael , but he figured considering everything that he had done to get his son off the island, he would be living with him somewhere. Unless: "Have you checked the morgues?"

"Three separate occasions, along with a lot of hospitals. We've also looked under John Does fitting his description. But we haven't found anything yet." Frainey looked at him. "Sir, I realize that you've sunk a lot of money into this, and I realize that, for clear reasons, you can't just go to the police."

Hurley had the grace to look the way he always did when he was caught in a lie. "So you knew?"

"I'd checked the manifest of Oceanic 815 the first week. Both their names were on it. But I figured it was your business as to why you wanted to track down your friends. "

Now Hurley got serious. "Only one of them is my friend, dude. And anyway, I really can't tell you why I need to find him."

"It's none of my business as long as you keep paying me. But, Mr. Reyes, if he's not with his son, then he literally could be anywhere, and if he's not using his real name-" The P.I. sighed. "It may be a lot more than my people can handle."

Hurley thought this over. "How much for another month?"

The P.I. named a figure.

"If you don't have any leads by then, I'll let it go, but I really need to find Michael." Hurley normally cheerful visage grew grim. "You're better off not knowing why."


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Slowly, Jack was beginning to ease his way into life at Seattle Grace. Half the staff was so busy with the hustle and turnover at one of the three busiest hospitals in the country that none of them had recognized him; the other half was so busy with their own stuff that they hadn't even processed who he was. Occasionally, he would get the odd glance from a patient who thought that they had seen him on TV, but most of the time he was able to laugh it off. This wasn't LA after all.

For the most part, he had remained a closed book, not revealing anything about his past to anyone. It helped that very few people bothered him about it, and there was enough trauma to keep everyone busy.

Then, one shift, Thatcher Grey, the father of one of the surgical residents and one of the interns showed up in the emergency room, completely plastered. This wouldn't have been an issue for Jack, except that day O'Malley and Lexie Grey were covering the ER with him, and Meredith was in the process of treating him.

By now, Jack had picked up enough gossip to know what had happened between the two half-sisters, and what was going on now. He knew that even though the two were in the same hospital, he hadn't seen them exchange more than a sentence that didn't involve another patient's treatment. So when Meredith came to Lexie and told her that she actually was enjoying her father more when he was drunk, her rather spectacular explosion was something that most people would've turned away from. He realized that there was a fissure here that was widening greater with every day, and if somebody didn't at least make an effort, it would become a huge mess for the hospital.

He knew that Meredith's typical way of handling these kinds of things- which seemed to happen at this hospital far more frequently than would be considered normal- was to compartmentalize them, by getting buried in work or sneaking into the lounge for a roll in the hay with the _other_ Dr. Shepherd. So he decided to try and handle things a little differently, and asked Lexie to come to his office before her shift ended.

Lexie was, in typical fashion, very apologetic the moment she stepped into his office, saying that she knew how unprofessional she had behaved and that she was willing to submit to any disciplinary methods you may desire. "That came out far less sadomasochistic in my head, Dr. Shephard."

"I'm not going to demand any kind of reprimand, Dr. Grey, because as far as I'm concerned, you did nothing wrong." Jack began.

"I yelled at a resident in the middle of her work."

"You yelled at your sister while you father was battling one of the nastiest hangovers I've seen," Jack paused. "And I'm guessing by your reaction, that was a very light day."

"You're an expert in dealing with drunken fathers?" Lexie said.

Jack hoped the grimace on his face wasn't visible for very long. "As a matter of fact, I am." He swallowed. "What I'm about to tell you isn't exactly public knowledge, so I'd prefer if- "

Lexie nodded.

"My father was one of the best spinal surgeons in the world. He was also one of the hardest drinkers I've ever seen. The main difference that seem to between yours and mines was that he was a lot better at hiding it then yours is." He hesitated. "Except from those of us who knew better."

He had Lexie's full attention. "The last time he ever operated, a woman who was pregnant died on the table. He was so drunk that one of the OR nurse paged me. I came into the operating room just in time to see him shred her aorta."

"He persuaded everybody on the staff that he was okay, that nothing could be done. He even persuaded me, and I knew better." He paused. He'd never even told this to Kate. "So at the m and m conference, I told the truth. I did the right thing. And it essentially killed him."

Lexie almost jumped out of her seat. "Your father's dead?"

"He flew to Australia and went on the bender to end all benders. He hated me so much he went halfway around the globe to die." Jack hesitated. That was as far as he was willing to go.

"I'm sorry, I really am."

Jack was actually relieved to hear this; the fact that she hadn't known this meant that she didn't know his big secret. "Thank you, but that's not the point of this story. My father died before we could resolve our issues. Now maybe we never could've, but there was always a chance. Your father's still alive. He may be doing a lousy job at it, but he's still there. Someone has to try." He thought for a second, then plunged ahead. "I'm guessing that Meredith won't, so you have to be the bigger person."

"Some of things he calls me have been pretty horrible," she told him.

"It's not the stuff that he says when he's drunk that you have to worry about," he prodded. "It's what they say when they're sober. From the look of Thatcher, he hasn't been that way in a while."

Lexie had the good grace to look ashamed. "You can't help someone until they want to help themselves. They told us that the first day."

"I know," he admitted. "You just need to hold on, and not give up on him. I made that mistake with my father, and it was one of the biggest ones that I ever made. Just keep that in mind."

Lexie considered this. "And my sister?"

"Don't ask me; I'm an only child." He would come to regret telling her this a couple of months later. "Try to handle it as best you can. In the meantime, you're probably better off not being around her for the next few rotations."

"Thank you, Dr. Shephard."

Jack didn't expect any instant solution. He knew that his lesson might only last until Thatcher called his youngest daughter a pretentious bitch again. More to the point, he thought telling the story might exorcise some of the ghosts that he still had rattling around. He didn't know that there was still more trouble to come.

The argument between the Grey sisters was a gossip subject for a couple of days at the hospital, but it had been relatively modest compared to the next big thing - Izzie Stevens and Callie Torres nearly having a throwdown in the cafeteria.. Jack had been in surgery at the time, as had a couple others of the attendings, but enough people witnessed it to make it a big problems for a few hours. Jack was a little surprised to find that Stevens had started the thing- based on body mass alone, he thought Callie could've broken the blonde in two without even breaking a sweat- but the far bigger shock came when he learned the reason- Stevens had apparently slept with Callie's husband, George.

Jack had gotten to know Torres that well yet, and he knew, that if he were to go the sheer superficiality of looks, Stevens was the kind of woman that men cheated on their wives with. He knew that George, while very good to work with, had often been in a brown study when he had tried to work with it. Since Jack had never been an especially good teacher, he had made the assumption that this basically was his fault. Now he could see what part of the problem was.

Again, as with Lexie a couple of days earlier, he mulled whether he should consider getting involved- it wasn't like he was that he was much more skilled in the ways of love. Then again, from what he managed to gather in his first days at Seattle Grace, no one in the staff of this hospital had much more skill at that. (Sex was another matter, but he decided to try and avert his eyes when it came to that.) After a couple of straight shifts when it became clear that George just wasn't concentrating that well at work, he decided that, just as he had with Lexie, he decided to at least try. Being an outsider might help in this case.

He called in George to his office an hour before his next shift began on what he said was work related matters. At first, he considered going in subtly, then he remembered how blunt people like Bailey and Hahn were, and decided on the direct approach. "Did they actually comes to blows?" he asked after George was seated..

"I wasn't there," George decided to be direct to. "But Callie isn't the kind of woman who starts fights. I can't believe she would've started one over this."

"All the same, two women fighting over you," Jack couldn't help but channel Sawyer for a moment. "It's always the quiet ones."

"I never meant for this to happen, Dr. Shephard," George told him. "I had a whirlwind courtship with Callie, and I really thought she was the one, but Izzie's my best friend, and she seemed to have feelings for me, and then we did tequila shots and we somehow wound up in bed together, and everything just spun out of control, and now-"

He went on like this for nearly a minute- which for George O'Malley was something close to a filibuster. Even given the kind of daytime soap quality this hospital seemed to have, Jack was a little surprised that this kind of mess was following George, of all people. But it was clear that he had been carrying this with him for sometime, and sometimes venting did help.

"I don't know what to do anymore, Dr. Shephard. I mean, all this on top of having to repeat my first year." George told them.

"I'm literally the last person in the hospital you should turn to for romantic advice," Jack told him. "My marriage lasted less than a year, and I wasn't even the one who committed adultery."

That had been a little more than he had wanted to reveal, and it had sounded pretty cold coming from him. _Guess I have to work on how I behave with my interns, too._

"The last thing I wanted to do was hurt anybody," George replied, doggedly.

"Someone's going to get hurt no matter what," Jack told them. "What it comes down to is, who is worth staying with. And you would know better than I who that is."

George seemed to be considering this for a moment, seriously. Then he looked at Jack. "You're not really helping me."

Jack actually chuckled a bit at this. "I may be good at fixing people, but I learned the hard way that there are some things that I'm not qualified to operate on." He sobered up. "I've been willing to grant you a little latitude because of your situation, but I don't know them the way that you do. And if Dr. Weber forces me, I have to follow the chain of command."

"What does that have to do with-"

"Couple of times, Weber has been asking the attendings if Callie has been pulling her weight as chief. Says she's been distracted." Jack said slowly. "He doesn't know why. Almost everybody else does. We've been covering, but..."

"You do know there have been issues like this at Seattle Grace before," George pointed out "Why is no one reaming out Dr. Montgomery or the other Dr. Shepherd?"

Jack didn't know enough about the situation at the hospital beyond the gossip, but he knew that anywhere other than Seattle Grace, Derek Shepherd and Mark Sloan would've been fired, and Meredith and Christina would've been held back, if not kicked out of the program. But he'd been here long enough to know that the ethics codes that seemed to apply to other hospitals didn't seem remotely in play here. It was, if he'd been honest, part of the reason he'd been attracted to this hospital in the first place.

"I don't envy the situation you're in," he told George instead. "But the fact is, you're the only one who can fix it. And I'd do it before someone's career gets tanked in the process."

For a moment, he thought that he had gone to far. But George sat silently for a few more moments, then told him: "I'll do what I can, but no promises." Then he got up and left.

This time, the ramifications from Jack's speech would be felt a lot quicker than his intervention with Lexie Grey. Unfortunately, the end results would not be nearly as pleasant. Within the next three days, Callie Torres would resign as chief resident. He tried not to hear the gossip that spread through the halls, but it soon became clear that George and Callie's marriage would be even shorter than Jack's, and even less amicable a separation.

Under other circumstances, Jack's first reaction would've been: _This is my fault._ God knew it had been his go-to response whenever something had gone wrong with his situation, especially on the island. But he quickly realized that despite the fact that George was currently his intern, there were a lot more people in his life who had a greater influence on his actions, most of whom had been here a whole lot longer.

Still, he decided that from this point on, he'd stick to fixing people in the ER, the one place where he could keep the fear out.

ALBEQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

PHILIPS RESIDENCE

Compared to everyone else, James Ford had to undergo the most changes ever since he had returned to civilization. He hadn't had nearly as big a rap sheet as Kate had, but it had been close. Fortunately for him, ever since his sentence had been commuted, he had managed to stay off the radar of the police for the last couple of years.

He had considered going on the run himself after the Oceanics had resurfaced, knowing that the celebrity attention would just cause the cops to look more closely at him. But he understood the law a lot better than Kate had, and knew that the statute of limitations had run out on the majority of the cons that he had committed. And considering what had happened with the actual Sawyer, he no longer felt the urge to go forward with any more of them. After all, Anthony Cooper was dead, and he assuredly would not be missed. He had considered going after Hibbs for sending him on the run that had landed him in Australia in the first place, but he figured, hell, if it hadn't been for him, he would never have been able to satisfy his lifelong goal. Maybe that did make up for the Tampa job.

Like Jack, it had caused him a world of hurt when Kate ran for the border, but he had not been nearly as surprised. Kate ran. It was what she'd done all her life, and nothing that had happened on the island could change that. He had recovered a lot quicker than Jack had, though. And even he had been surprised by the reason why.

Considering how hostile their relationship had been on the island, no one, not even James himself, could've expected that he would've ended up in a relationship with Juliet. The woman was an Other, had held a gun to his head on more than one occasion, and had, time after time, been one of the few people who had called him on his bullshit. Paradoxically, though, that had been one of the reasons he had found himself intrigued by her- none of the people he had gotten close to - not even Kate - had ever known him as well as she had. Granted, she had gotten the majority of his information on her from a file (and Lord knows where the hell _that_ had come from), but not having to lie about everything was refreshing. Honestly, he'd never done it with anyone in his life.

Since he hadn't had any roots but he still felt rather tied to the south, he had eventually gone back to Alabama. Within a week, he had gone to visit Juliet in Miami, where she had returned to be with her sister and her nephew. Eventually, they had formed something close to a friendship, and now, it was turning into something of a romantic one as well. He was surprised to find that Rachel had approved of their relationship - James had never been the kind of woman you brought home to your family (unless, of course, said family had a shitload of cash.)

Finally, after several months had passed, and the final payment from Oceanic had arrived, he gathered his nerve to tell Juliet that there was something he needed to do. Something that he'd been avoiding dealing with. He had expected scorn, and was surprised to find that there was support and even pride when he had told her what he had in mind.

Which had brought them, more or less, to here. Juliet, who had empathized with his need for privacy, hadn't even objected when they had wanted to drive from Miami to New Mexico (even though it would just be over the land, James was nowhere near ready to get back on an airplane again). However, considering that she had seemed to know every detail of his life, including why he had been in prison, who had sent him there, and how he had gotten out, James was more than a little shocked to find out that she didn't know he was a father.

"You honestly weren't even curious?" he asked her as they drove the final couple of miles.

"Honestly, by the time we first met, I had long since gotten tired of knowing chapter and verse of everybody on your plane." she admitted. "Being an Other was exhausting. One of the many, many reasons I'm glad we're off that island. Some of the things were just your business."

"Well, you're about to find out where that info came from," James took a deep breath. "We're here."

Considering all the places he'd been held in all his life, he didn't know why this simple little structure seemed so imposing. Juliet sensed his uneasiness. "You're sure you want me to come with you, James? She may not be wild to see you, let alone some stranger."

"I didn't have the nerve to see my daughter before everything that happened. And Cassidy had every reason to hate my guts when she told me about," he swallowed a little "my daughter. If I don't have someone who believes in me when I knock on that door, I'm gonna turn tail, and drive until I hit the canyon."

"All right then." She unlocked the passenger side door. "Here we go."

They walked up to the front door, Juliet standing a little behind him, almost as if to prop him up. It still took him nearly thirty seconds standing there before he found the nerve to ring the doorbell.

Cassidy opened it. She didn't slam the door in his face, but the first word out of her mouth was not encouraging. "Sonofabitch."

"I guess, you now know why I haven't gotten back to you in the last year," he said slowly.

"You know, when the story broke about Oceanic, I actually wanted to brag that I knew somebody on that flight. Could've gotten my fifteen minutes. Especially when I told the world what a bastard like you was being called a hero." Cassidy told him in a tone that was just as measured but far more venomous. "Who's the blonde? Your latest mark? Does she know what a prick she's hanging out with?"

"Actually, I know James a lot better than you'd think," Juliet told her.

"James. You know, I only learned his real name when he went to prison."

"You should know that. You're the one who sent me there." A bit of the old Sawyer was in his voice, but he tamped it down. "Look, much as it would probably make you feel better, I didn't come here to fight."

Cassidy considered this for a couple of moments more. "Last thing I want is a crowd building up," she said as she opened the door.

"Since I know that you're not here to exchange fond memories of our relationship, it begs the question, why?"

She wasn't even going to ask them to settle down. James could hardly blame her. Well, he had never been one to be subtle. "The only time you came to visit me in the slammer was when you told me about my daughter." He took a deep breath. "How is Clementine?"

For the first time since she'd opened the door, Cassidy softened a little. "She's doing good. Going to be starting nursery school in a month. All the other kids have to keep up with her."

Now that he had finally gotten her to talk about her, James now realized he had next to no idea what kind of questions to ask about a toddler. "She healthy? Walking and talking all right?"

"She's been doing fine. Had the chicken pox six months ago, but that's about it." Suddenly her mother got very protective. "But since when do you care? When I told you about her, you said wanted nothing to do with her."

James decided not to tell her he had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure that his daughter had gotten a fairly healthy trust fund when he had conned his way out of prison. Indeed, from the sound of her mother's voice, it was beginning to look like she'd never gotten it. "This may come as a helluva shock to you, but you don't survive an experience like I did, and not have it change you a little. I've been trying to get my life in order, ever since I got back to civilization. Put right what I did wrong. And you were the biggest thing that I felt guilty over. I'm hoping that there's some way that we can clean the slate."

Cassidy was silent for a long time, long enough for him to think that he just might be getting through to her. Then her eyes clouded over and her face hardened. "You want to know the damnedest thing, Sawyer? A few months after you stole my life savings, I ran into this girl. Her car was being towed into a gas station where I was trying to run a score of my own. We got to talking, went to a local bar, and it turned out, she was on the run from the law herself."

It couldn't be. He refrained from commenting.

"Apparently, her stepfather had been abusing her mother. She killed him, and set her mom up for life. Then her mom called the marshal and turned her in. She risked her freedom to try and find out why. I decided to help her, though I really wish that I hadn't. Turned out that her mom somehow still loved this abusive bastard, and could never forgive her."

Now Juliet had gone still. "Who was this woman?"

" Ask James. Her name was Kate Austen. Small world, isn't it?"

This hurt in a way that Kate's disappearing had not managed to. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Once we were done. she asked me if I could ever forgive the man who stole my life savings. I asked her if she could ever forgive her mother. Our questions both had the same answer then." She turned her steely glance to James. "What the hell makes you think the answer has changed now?"

James had a lot of bravado in him, but as many of the people on the island- particularly Kate- had found out - it was mostly just a front. Whatever force he could put up pretty much wilted away to nothing. But damn it, this was his daughter.

He was about to put up one last argument, when suddenly he heard the faintest little sound pop up. "Momma?"

All three of their heads spun around, but Cassidy, no doubt because she was used to it, reacted the quickest. "I guess you woke up."

"Who they?" Cassidy pointed to James.

"No one important. They were just leaving." Cassidy's eyes never left her daughter. "Right."

That finally deflated what was left of James' nerve. "Sorry to trouble you, Miss Phillips. We'll be leaving."

He thought that he had moved quickly, but it just wasn't fast enough.

For a horrible moment, James thought that he was going to shed a tear, something he didn't think he'd done since his parents funeral.

"I don't think I've ever seen you give up that fast."

He had barely noticed Juliet leave with him,. "You heard her. She doesn't want shit to do with me. Given how I turned her life to shit, can't say that I really blame her."

"You got out of prison four years ago. You were roaming the country all those years before Oceanic and you never thought once of visiting Clementine?"

Juliet had always had the better of him. It was clear that was why he was falling in love with her. "I ruined her life, Jule. You really think she would hired a brass band if I'd come back before with flowers and chocolates?"

"There are ways you can make it up to her, James." Juliet reminded him. "Lest you forget, that was part of the reason you made this 3000 mile drive. And I don't think things are as dark as all that."

"She didn't give me ten minutes."

"She didn't slam the door in your face, and she let you see her daughter. Honestly, when you told me about this trip, I didn't think that either of those would happen."

A little smile appear on James' face. "Well, then why did you come on this cross country trek?"

"Moral support. Honestly, James, how long has it been since somebody believed in you?" Then before things could get too serious, she added. "And the chance to order room service."

"All right, Miss Manners, now that she's seen me, is there any way that I can get back in my daughter's life?"

"Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a guidance counselor." That actually got him to chuckle for the first time since they had entered the state of New Mexico. "Seriously, there may be some way to back in with your daughter, but I think you're going to need to be subtle to do it."

"And what might that be?"

"You're going to need help from your friends first."


	4. Chapter 3

"Thirty-three year old male, collision with an SUV left him in impaled on a rebar. Couldn't extricate in the scene, blood loss through chest and lower extremities," It was rather bizarre how quickly you got used to hearing terminology. Lexie was still dealing with it three months in.

"Passenger in the SUV, 29 year old female, glass cuts through the arms and legs, one big piece in the chest, and she's at least in her second trimester," the other paramedic told her.

"Page Shephard and Montgomery," Dr. Yang was telling her intern. "How many more people in the crash? " They had heard it was a multi-car pileup.

"At least one other ambo behind us. There were two other cars there."

Yang rattled off the usual rounds of initials and acronyms that meant the difference between life and death for most of these patients. Frankly, Lexie was a little surprised Dr. Bailey wasn't down here already. The word had gotten out about the mass trauma five minutes ago, and there was still no sign of the chief resident

"Why do they always leave the instrument in?" Yang was muttering. "Grey, we need to x-ray the patient."

Lexie blinked. There was at least a foot of rebar sticking out of the man's chest. "Um, how exactly do we -"

"Very carefully. Now get to it." She didn't bother to give further instructions, and she had a good reason not too, another ambulance was pulling up. Lexie had been working for Dr. Yang long enough to know that she had a habit of plucking the most dangerous surgery.

Just then, Jack Shephard showed up - they had managed to get it right the first time, something that they still screwed up on occasion. "Please tell me this guy is under, Dr. Grey," he asked quickly.

"Pulse is thready, but it's there," she told him, before mentally stumbling. "How the hell do we x-ray the patient?"

"Tell radiology to clear their biggest machine, we're going to need all the spare room that they've got." Jack tried to assure her. "Stevens?"

Izzie was currently doing her rotation with spinal this month. This had led to more than a few moments of awkwardness because O'Malley had become one of Jack's most trusted interns since he had arrived at Seattle Grace. And though he tried to declare neutrality, it was clear that he viewed Izzie as the main reason George was now seeing a divorce attorney.

"Yes, Dr. Shephard?" Izzie said hopefully.

"Get up to surgery: tell them we're going to need the best cauterization tool they have, along with the biggest forceps. This is going to be a bitch to get out. And call the blood bank. We're going to need at least four pints."

Stevens headed up. "You really think the blood loss is going to be that severe?"

"We won't know until we see the film, but I'm betting that bars cutting off a couple of vessels. Second we move it..." He trailed off. "Let's hope that I'm wrong."

He wasn't. When they finally got the film, it looked like the rebar was not only slicing open a major artery, it looked like it was puncturing the L5 vertebrae. Getting the thing out was going to be a real bitch, and even afterwards, they were going to need hours of work in order to repair it. "Hope you didn't have any more plans for the next shift, Dr. Grey, I'm guessing that this is going to take at least five hours.. Especially, if this guy is ever going to have a chance of walking again."

Lexie wasn't an expert on spinal surgeries by any means, but based on what she had seen on the films, the damage to the spine and surrounding area was severe. The chances of the patient even surviving this surgery weren't that good, never mind leaving the hospital bed. "You really think that it's possible?"

It was hard to tell with the surgical masks on, but Lexie could see that Dr. Shephard had one of those far away looks he sometimes got. 'I've done a lot more with less." He shrugged it off. "Anyway, we won't know until we get started. Dr. Grey, I need you to position yourself on top of the rebar, and above all keep it steady until I say otherwise."

Lexie was never certain whether this kind of thing was reward or punishment - or perhaps some combination of the two. Nevertheless, she knew that if this thing moved before Dr. Shephard was ready, the patient might die of blood loss right there. So she got over it and held it, hoping that her bladder would hold out.

According to the clock, it was thirty-five minutes of working around the rebar before Jack realized that he'd done as much as he could without having to touch the rebar. Taking a deep breath, he turned to Lexie: "All right, I don't think that we have any choice. We're going to have to pull it out. You got a tight grip?"

Lexie nodded. Jack positioned himself near the bar, and put his hands around the top of it. "On three: one, two, three"

It took nearly two minutes of yanking before the piece of metal finally was yanked loose. They had no sooner got it out when a blood vessel seems to burst, and the machines around them went crazy. "Shit!" Jack called Stevens over to the table. "We need to close off this leak fast! Get ready to use the laser where I tell you!"

Stevens had never used a laser in her entire life, but she knew that if she stopped to explain, their patient would die in the interim. So very delicately, she began to zap the vessel that had been ruptured. Dr. Shephard in the meantime started barking orders to Lexie and the nurses to keep positioning themselves around the vessel, knowing that if he kept bleeding so profusely, the side effects could be lead to paralysis no matter what any of them.

"Makes me wish I played video games more," Izzie muttered to herself. It was a long five minutes before she finally got the vessel cauterized, and another three minutes after that before the blares of the electronics finally started reading normally again.

"Well, we got the bar out. Now, let's see if we can get him back to normal."

The patient's name was Kevin Ramsey. The surgery on him had been a bastard, but he'd managed to come out of it alive, which considering what a mess he'd been in was nothing short of remarkable. Now, of course, came the after care, a part where, even before he had been in the plane crash, he had never been the most subtle of caretakers.

So, when Jack had come in with his group of interns, he had decided to do it with a certain level of subtlety and had asked if everyone except he and Dr. Stevens could have the room to talk with him

"The rebar punctured your L5 vertebrae, and there was a fair amount of blood loss before we managed to completely repair. Now, the good news is the damage was fixable and we managed to get most of it under control. But given the combination of factors, the chances are fairly good that the paralysis that you are undergoing may turn out to be permanent."

Ramsey seemed to take this a lot better than many of the other patients did. "Is there anything you can do to fix it?" he asked.

"There is the possibility that the pressure on your spinal column may ease on its own. We'll know more in the next twenty-four hours."

"And if it doesn't?"

Jack considered this. "There are a couple of procedures that we maybe able to perform. But I have to warn you in advance that they may be incredibly risky."

"I can't feel my legs and I have a catheter up my ass. How much worse could things get?" Ramsey seemed to be determined to push this.

"You're alive, Mr. Ramsey, and you're not in a great deal of pain." Jack told him with equal bluntness. "Right now, everything that you've experienced can be managed. I can't guarantee that if you go back into the OR, those things will stay the same."

Ramsey seemed to be considering this for several seconds. Then, for the first time, he looked at Izzie Stevens. "You've been awfully quiet. What do you think?"

"Mr. Ramsey, I realize you don't want to be in this position. And if you really want us to be more aggressive in our approach, we will be. But technically speaking, this is the best approach to take if you want to live. I know things feel very dark now, but there are ways you can get through this."

"I don't want to talk to a fucking shrink. I want to walk again. If you're not prepared to do that, maybe I should get a second opinion." Ramsey was turning sullen, and Jack decided that it was best that they let him be alone for now.

He knew things hadn't gone well, but he was a little surprised that Stevens waited until they were halfway down the hall to tell him. "Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner leaves something to be desired?"

"More than a few people, Dr. Stevens." Jack decided not to mention who those people were. He decided to try and illustrate things a little. "You know that awesome surgery that everybody thinks landed me here?" he told Izzie.

"The surgery you performed on that woman in a car wreck four years ago," Stevens told him.

"I went into Sar- that woman's room, and told her, right before I was going to operate that even given by best work, there was almost no chance that she was going to walk again. Minute I get outside the door, my father tells me that even there's a ninety-nine percent chance that the patient is going to be monumentally screwed, you should hold out that one percent chance they're going to be okay. When I told him that was 'false hope', he told me: 'Yes, but it's still hope.'"

"Well, I don't pretend to know the situation, but I tend to agree with your father."

Stevens never should've said that. "Really? Because I know about the type of medicine you practice. I'll admit I've done some things that were shaky ethically, but at least I never cut the L-VAT on a patient so that he could get a transplant."

This was clearly an old wound, and the look of devastation on Izzie's face reminded him in a painful way of Kate. "There were extenuating circumstances," she struggled to get out.

"You must really be loved at this hospital to still be in the program. If you had done that at St. Sebastian, your ass would've been out on the street after the transplant." Jack didn't know why he was doing this anymore. "Why did you want to work with me in the first place? Do you have some real desire to be a spinal surgeon, or did you just want a fresh start with the only doctor here who didn't know your deep dark secret?"

Why the hell was he saying these things? It was true that he was right morally, but considering his own history, his hands weren't that much cleaner than hers.

Stevens took a few seconds to respond, clearly to regain control of herself. "Maybe it would be better if I transferred to the next surgeon on call for the rest of my rotation," she said slowly.

"No," Jack told her. "I was out of line. I realize there were other factors in play. But damn it, you've got to get a handle on this. I realize better than you know that its nearly impossible to separate yourself emotionally from these cases. "

"I know. It's just..." she trailed off. "A lot has been going to hell the last couple of months. I can't stay out of the gossip in the hospital, no matter how hard I try. Beginning to think I'm cursed."

"No such things, Stevens. Believe me, there's no such thing."

SANTA MONICA

When Hurley had heard that Jin and Sun were planning on moving to America, he had been sure to do everything to make sure that his friends didn't have to deal with any of the headaches that came with trying to relocate.

He had helped arrange for a private plane to fly them from South Korea to a private airstrip. He knew that could more than afford the trip themselves, but he knew damn well that flying over the Pacific more than a year after the Oceanic trip was something that neither had been looking forward to.

He knew how tough the LA house market was, so for the interim he had offered to put them up at his place. After what had unfolded just before they had been rescued, he no longer believed he was cursed. He then decided that since that since neither he nor the money was cursed, the best thing he could was to use it to help people. He would've offered to buy Jin and Sun a house outright, but he knew that they could afford it, and he figured that this was somehow a key part of their journey.

Ever since their return to civilization, the Oceanics had spread out all over the country. Nevertheless, they had all managed to keep in touch over the past year. Even Claire who had resettled back in Sydney had made a couple of flights back to LA on more than one occasion. But they tended to gather in groups of a half dozen or so, rarely as a whole.

So when the Kwons had finally managed to find a house that they liked, Hurley had called almost everybody from the island, and had asked them if they wanted to get together for a housewarming party. With the exception of Des and Penny, who were still hiding from Charles Widmore, and Claire, who had told Hurley that a medical problem had just come up, everyone had agreed to make it. The last call he had made had been to Jack, who had mainly communicated through calls the last couple of months, but he had told Hurley that he would take the next few days off to catch up with his friends.

As it was, he came next to last on the guest list (Sayid and Nadia came in a few minutes later). Hurley had never been the most observant guy, but he could tell Jack looked a lot more relaxed than the last time that he had seen him.

"I guess your new job's really keeping you busy," he said after giving Jack a fairly massive hug.

"It helps make me feel like my old self," he admitted to Hurley.

"You make any new friends?"

"Couple. Good thing is, everybody in a surgical rotation is so busy, they don't watch the news as much as regular people," Jack told him. "I've been in Seattle two months, and no one seems to have recognized me."

Hurley sensed that Jack was clearly tense about this, so he decided to bring them over to Jin and Sun instead, who had just emerged from putting their daughter down for a nap.

Jack was glad to see them. "I'm really happy you decided to go through with this," he told them.

"It's probably best for Ji Yeon," Jin said in measured English.

"Your English has gotten a lot better," Sayid told him.

"I had a good teacher," Jin told them. Sun smiled.

"May I-" Juliet seemed a lot shier than she had when they had been on the island.

Sun took out some of the picture they had of Ji Yeon. Jack could tell that Juliet was moved, which made a certain amount of sense- Sun had been her last patient when they had been on the island. "She has Jin's eyes," she told her.

"Ain't this just like a woman. Show her pictures of a baby, the strongest one becomes a mass of Jell-O," Sawyer told her

Juliet seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but for some reason, she held her tongue.

"Hey, Doc, been awhile." Sawyer shook Jack's hand. For the first time since they knew each other, Hurley could sense that there was no tension between them. "Come back from an island vacation, you don't write, you don't call?"

"Could say the same for you," Jack gave a small smile. "How've things been?"

Once again, Sawyer put on his poker face. But Hurley, who had gotten the measure of the con man on more than one occasion could tell that something was bothering him. He figured it was the obvious, that it had to do with Kate not being here. As it turned out, though, he couldn't have been more wrong.

"Big Boy, can I have a moment of your time?" he asked about an hour later.

"Sure, dude, what's up?"

Sawyer now actually looked a little embarrassed for the first time since he had known him. "Realize that by telling you this, our whole little circle's probably gonna know about it by the end of the party," he said slowly.

"I can keep a secret when I have to," Hurley pointed out.

"All right. Here goes." He took a deep breath. "I wasn't exactly a model citizen before the plane crash, either. Did some pretty shit things. Worst of them was, I spent six months in Iowa, conning a girl named Cassidy out of her life savings."

Hurley had known Sawyer had been in some trouble with the law when he talked to Kate. Still, actually hearing it from him first hand was a hell of a shock. "Holy crap, dude."

"She got the better of me, though. She turned me into the cops. Ended up doing some time in jail." Sawyer held up his hand. "Gets better, too. Before my time was up, she came to see me, told me I had a daughter named Clementine."

Hurley didn't want to think how much his eyes had come out of his head when he heard that. Sawyer had grown immensely in his time on the island, but he was probably the last person suited for parenthood. Instead, he glanced over at Juliet. "Does she know?"

"You knew the kind of files that the Others kept on all of us. But even their information had limits. Blondie knew what prison I was in, when and why, but she didn't know about that particular detail." Sawyer took a deep breath. "Told her about it about a month ago."

"How'd she take it?"

"Lot better than you are." Sawyer hesitated. "Sorry, Hugo, old habits. Anyway, couple weeks ago, we took a trip down to Albuquerque to see her, mainly so I could apologize, and try and set things right between him. She let me in the house for all of five minutes, before she kicked my ass to the curb."

Hurley wasn't entirely sure what to say - a rare occurrence for him. Finally, he told him: "I'm sorry, dude, I really am. But, um, why are you telling me all this?"

Sawyer took a breath. "For the first time in my life, I got all the money I need, and nothing useful to do with it. I tried getting them some cash a few years back, but considering where she was living, Cassidy clearly never got it. You had a lot of money before Oceanic crashed, and you clearly knew how to make it work for you. That's why I'm coming to you. I want to set up a trust for Clementine."

Hurley had never thought, even given everything that they had been through together, that Sawyer would ever come to him talking like he was better than him at something. And even though he knew how much this had to mean to him, his first reaction was still quintessentially Hugo Reyes: "Look, I can help you with that, God knows I have the people to talk to, but are you really sure this is how you want to have a relationship with your daughter?"

"Right now, Hugo, this is the only relationship I _can_ have with her." Sawyer's eyes seemed far away. "Look, I want to be in Clementine's life. I don't think I realize that 'til I got back. And I know it would be good if she and Aaron and Ji Yeon could someday play together. But right now, I just don't see that happening. And unless I can find a way, this is the only way that I can take care of her. So come on Hugo, can you help me with this or not?"

Hurley didn't hesitate. "I'll talk to my guys about it. And Sawyer, I hope like hell you can get her to change her mind."

"So do I, Big Boy."

Just then, Sayid walked up to them. "You two seem unusually deep in thought. Anything serious?"

"It's kind of personal, dude." Hurley told Sayid. "Hopefully, someday soon, we'll be able to tell about it."

"I sure as hell hope so." Sawyer's voice turned playful. "So tell me something: when are you and the missus thinking about having a couple of rug rats?"

"I could say the same for you and Juliet," Hurley couldn't help but notice how much more relaxed Sayid was from the last few weeks.

Sawyer got a faraway look on his face. "Honestly, we haven't even had that conversation. Right now, Blondie's so wrapped up in her nephew that I don't think she's given it much of a thought."

"Well, she was on that island longer than the rest of us," Hurley told her. "Plus, you know, whole Other's fertility doctor thing. That could have taken a lot out of her."

"Maybe not as much as you'd think," Sawyer told them. "She actually wanted to talk to Doc about what she'd have to do in order to get back into private practice. Maybe working as an OB again."

"That's kinda awesome," Hurley told them. "Okay, when she tells the rest of us, try to act surprised, but Sun and Jin are gonna ask Juliet if she can be Ji Yeon's official godmother."

Both Sawyer and Sayid did something that Hurley had never seen either of them do on the island - they both laughed. "Well, I guess she is the most responsible of any of us," Sayid told them.

"Guns to our heads and all," Sawyer said. "Then again, she tell me that telling Sun she was going to have a baby was the best news she'd ever given in three years on the island."

Sayid turned solemn again. "Having to be at that man's beck and call for three years would've done a nightmare on that woman's psyche. I can't imagine the dreams she must have."

"That's pretty understanding, considering how much you know, you hated her when you first met," Hurley pointed out.

Sayid paused for a minute. "Juliet was always honest. I don't think I realized it until we were rescued. She was always honest about who she was and what she did. She never really was one of them. I guess I never realized it until we were off the island."

"You finally seeing a shrink?' Sawyer asked, only half in jest.

"My wife. She is the best part of me. And she's helped make me whole."

Sawyer smiled. "Know what you mean." Then he shrugged. "Think we've been getting a little too serious. I'd say its time we kick back a few. Where's the drinks?"

"Don't know what we have that's your kind of thing."

"Hell, as long as it doesn't have a Dharma label on it, I'm gonna be fine."


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

Jack had transferred to Seattle Grace to get away from the publicity that followed the Oceanics who had relocated to LA. Jin and Sun and Sawyer had admitted there had been some press after them outside of the media glare, but nowhere as much as what Hurley and Sayid had gone through staying in California. (Admittedly Hurley had been more of a target _before_ the crash, so he had been more used to it) Even after Jack had returned to LA for the housewarming party, he had been fortunate enough to slip under the radar. He had almost begun to think that maybe he had found a certain amount of anonymity in one of the most well known hospitals in the country.

Unfortunately, after being on the island for three months, he had forgotten the problems with the slow news cycle. 2006 was not an election year - at least, not a major one. And eventually the major networks and the internet servers got tired of doing stories related of the usual Congressional gridlock and preparations for the Academy Awards. Add to this the fact that January was traditionally the quietest month of the year when it came to dealing with news, and it was probably inevitable that someone would start looking for human interest stories. And you couldn't get more human interest than the anniversary of the safe return of forty passengers from one of the biggest airplane crashes in history.

So on January 3, all of the Oceanics began getting harangued by the media as everybody began trying to find or talk with some of the survivors of Flight 815. And the fact of the matter was there were so many different angles, that every network had a different set of questions. CBS wondered if the plane crash could have had any ties to the Paik syndicate, the father of one of the survivors, and rumored to be one of the most notorious crime lords in Asia. Fox considered the possibility that Sayid Jarrah, high on the U.S. militaries watchlist for crimes after the first Gulf War, might have been responsible for bringing the plane down. NBC pointed out that many of the passengers on the flight, most notably James Ford and fugitive Kate Austen, had been involved in many criminal enterprises, and both spent time tracking down law enforcement officials who had been pursuing them. And CNN filled an endless amount of time, trying to prove how a plane that had been found in the Sunda Trench with all 324 passengers on board, could somehow come up with forty survivors more than a month after the wreckage had been found.

All of the Oceanics gave Jack the heads up that something like this was probably going to hit him, probably sooner rather later. Jack had managed to work at Seattle Grace for more than four months without even bringing up why he had transferred from St. Sebastian. Richard Webber had known about the circumstances, of course, but he had used his discretion in not telling the staff, because frankly, it wasn't relevant to anything. But even as he watched his friends give interviews on most of the media outlets, Jack had entertained the naive hope that he might manage to emerge from this undisturbed.

That notion flew to pieces on one of the most innocuous of notes, when a diligent reporter at Good Morning America, doing a piece for the medical segment about a clinical trial involving Dr. Derek Shepherd had found out because of a clerical error that Jack Shephard was also working there. He had passed it onto his producer, who in turn passed it on to a news reporter who had been thinking of retiring that year, and had decided to hold out for one more story. Unfortunately, this elder statesman was still not nearly as good when it came to dealing with social media, and the information leaked to a competitor. Within two hours, every media outlet in the country knew where the man who had been the spokesman for the survivors of Oceanic 815 was working.

So, at 7:55 A.M, the next day, when Jack was driving into the hospital, his cover had been blown in the most horrible way, when it seemed that every major media outlet in the country (and a couple from Australia) had converged around Seattle Grace. Which would've been bad anywhere, but they all assembled in the ambulance bay. And that meant that half the staff, and most of the residents came to the hospital, and had been deluged by a cacophony of questions about him as they walked into the hospital

"Does _everybody_ at this hospital come her with a ridiculous amount of baggage?" Alex asked Christina by the time the five of them had gotten together by the ER.

"Why? Is there some dark, deep secret that you still haven't told us, Karev?" Christina needled.

"Hey, we're not talking about me. We're talking about Dr. 'I-Survived The Worst Plane Crash in History and I Didn't Tell Anyone About it"

"That's a mouthful. Doesn't roll off the tongue the way 'McDreamy' and McSteamy' do." As seemed to be the case, everybody looked at George as if he had grown a second head. "Hey, just saying. You've gotta come up with a better nickname."

"George has a point, though," Meredith said. "If I'd gone through something like that, and come out the other side, I'd tattoo it to my head."

"Like the fact that you broke up with McDreamy five months ago, and are still sneaking off to schtup him in the closet?" Alex asked.

Meredith considered this for a few moments, and then did what she always did when the subject was her sex life: change the subject. "Izzie, you did a rotation with him for two weeks; did he even hint at this?"

"The guy must be the greatest poker player in the world. He didn't even hint at it." Izzie had been quiet because she'd been playing those same two weeks in her head over and over, looking for even the smallest hint that the attending she'd been shadowing had been hiding this from her. Hell, from all of them.

"Did this place turn into TMZ while I wasn't paying attention?" Even though, technically speaking, they were all at least on the same level of her by now, everybody jumped as Miranda Bailey approached them. "Are you all stringers for a major supermarket tabloid?"

"Come on, Dr. Bailey, you know there's more to this-"

"Answer the damn question! Are you reporters or is this a hospital?"

They knew better than to keep the Nazi waiting for an answer. "This is a hospital."

"And I know for goddamn sure that you all have more pressing matters to deal than to wonder what our most recent attending did before he came to Seattle Grace! So you have until the count of three to get back to whatever patients or paperwork or interns you have to deal with!"

The five of them knew better than to fuck around; everybody had jumped back to work before Bailey had finished "one". However, had they bothered to wait around after the smoke had cleared, they might have noticed that the chief resident had stayed behind. Because about a minute later, Jack Shephard managed to clear the gauntlet of reporters, looking like he was halfway to a nervous breakdown.

Half the staff would've been equally shocked to see a look of sympathy - an expression that many of the interns didn't think Miranda Bailey was capable of - appear on her face. "You could've paged me. I could've gotten you an easier way in."

Jack was used to seeing a lot of expressions on Miranda's face over the last few months, but he never had paged her as the touchy-feely type. It was one of the reasons he had so much respect for her. So when she asked but didn't ask about the secret he'd been hiding ever since he'd started working here, he felt compelled to confide in her. "I've been through a lot of this shit for the past year. It's best to just try and deal with it head on." He shrugged. "I figured if I just did it now, they'd get the hell out."

"You up to facing patients today? My guess is, from here on out, they're going to think twice before wanting to see you."

"Best thing for me now, is to keep working." Jack told her. "I'll make sure I'm not holding a scalpel today, but I can consult without much of a problem."

As they walked away from the door he added; "I should probably have a talk with the Chief. Tell him, maybe the best thing to is hold a press conference. Get this out of the way before it gets any messier."

"Did he know about this before he hired you?" Miranda asked.

"He has access to the Internet. I can't imagine my name didn't come up in connection with the phrase 'plane crash' when he checked my resume." Jack shook his head. "If he didn't, this is a hell of a way to find out."

"Gotta hand it to you, keeping this close to the vest four full months in this gossip center." Miranda said.

"Tell me about it, I was here three days, I knew who everybody was sleeping with and why." Jack gave a smile. "Miranda, it ever feel like everyone in the world is having sex except for you?"

A strange look passed Dr. Bailey's face. "I'm married with a baby, remember?" She shrugged. "So, I guess the answer's yes."

"I came to Seattle Grace because of it's reputation, and the people who worked here. Didn't think I was going to land in the middle of an 80's sex-comedy."

"Feels that way a lot of the time." Bailey had noticed that Jack was doing a lot of deflecting to keep from talking about what had happened to him after surviving the plane crash, never mind apparently coming back from the dead. But she wasn't going to press him on it. She wasn't that in the mood for gossip, and she knew that the grilling he had just taken from the press was going to be nothing compared to the residents of this hospital.

"You've been remarkably patient. Which frankly, isn't something that most of the doctors at this hospital would be given the circumstances." Jack said suddenly. "I think that entitles you to ask me a question."

Miranda didn't slow down, and the expression on her face didn't change. Nevertheless, it was clear that she was surprised to hear this coming from him. "It's your business."

"Come on, Miranda, you're telling me that you're not the least bit curious to know what it was like being stranded in the South Pacific on a deserted island for almost a hundred days." Jack made a gesture towards the entourage which showed no sign of thinning. "You're certainly more deserving of an answer than they are."

"You're serious about this?" she asked.

"You promise not to tell anyone else; I'll answer anything about it you want to know," he told her. "Your word's good enough for me."

She thought it over for a few seconds, not sure whether or not this was some kind of trick. Then she decided, _the hell with it._ "All right. It must have been a tremendous strain being stranded for so long. Did anybody get hurt when you were on the island?"

"We lost more than a few people." Jack was neutral even now.

"Anyone you feel responsible for?"

Jack hesitated, then plunged. "I felt responsible for everyone who died. Not just on the island, but every patient that I've ever lost. Maybe that makes me a bad doctor."

"On the contrary, I'd say that makes you a great doctor. Maybe better than a lot of the ones I've met. Never doubt that, Jack."

Considering that Bailey handed out compliments like a person could throw barrels, Jack knew this meant a lot. " I'm going to my office for a couple of hours. Do me a favor. Keep the residents away til then."

"They're not going to let this go just because you say so."

"They will if you tell them emphatically enough."

FLORENCE, ITALY

If Jack was the most uncomfortable member of the Oceanic survivors with the publicity that had been at the center of renewed media interest, Sayid was a close second. Admittedly, he had a much better reason for his distrust of the press, and the rest of the world, than any of the others. But the fact was that he wasn't particularly wild about having to go through a rehash of everything that he had been accused of in Iraq.

There were several well known commentators who, with the renewal of the interest in the Oceanic story, along with the struggles of the American occupation of his home country who thought that he should be tried for war crimes. The voices on the right said that he was a symbol of America's failings the first time in the Gulf; the voices on the left thought that if they had been willing to try some of Sayid's friends, they should be willing to try someone whose crimes were much worse. Sayid almost expected one of the news channels to announce a poll on this, which would've been mildly ironic since the media had called him a hero in the early days after their reappearance. Not only that, the FBI, including a couple of agents who he would've been just as happy never to hear from again, had been making appearances on other media outlets, saying things that dealt with issues that all of them would've been happy never to deal with again.

He had a pretty good idea what might be coming when Hugo and Sun had both called him about CNN calling them for interviews. So, right after celebrating New Years, he had told Nadia that it might be in their interest to celebrate their first anniversary a week earlier than usual. By now, his wife had gotten used to the surge of publicity that had been following them, and was more than willing to get out of the country for a few weeks. She had understood why her husband didn't want to go to London or Paris, so she'd been more than willing to settle for a tour of Italy. He had ignored the option to use the Golden Tickets Oceanic had given them as part of the settlement, and taken a less public airline.

But even in Florence, they couldn't escape it completely. Sayid had found as much out when he had come up to their hotel room, and found that one of the Italian news channels was running an interview with the Kwons, who they had found after a couple of days of looking. He found it ironic that their now perfect English was now being dubbed into very loud Italian.

Still, despite all that, no one had recognized either he or his wife in Italy, something that he had hoped would continue as they had went out for dinner. Unfortunately, the restaurant that they had chosen had been overcrowded, and they had been forced to wait in an area that was surrounded by bitter cold.

"How much longer do you think it'll be?" Nadia asked, when he came back from his second visit with the maitre'd.

"He assured us that it would be no more than ten minutes, but he gave us those assurances the last time," He sighed. "Perhaps we should consider dining somewhere else."

"I'm not in any particular hurry," she told them. "Besides, I actually like the cold."

"Yeah, you can't exactly allow time to interfere with anything. It'll only come back to bite you."

Sayid looked up, half expecting to see a reporter of some kind. But the young man who greeted them didn't have the look of a paparazzi. "How long have you been waiting for a table?"

"I'm not waiting for one. I'm waiting for my date." The man, who looked to be in his mid-twenties, with a neat haircut and a full beard, looked at his watch again. "She's already twenty minutes late, and I'm beginning to think I've been stood up."

Sayid was suspicious by nature, and this story didn't sound particularly original. "How long have you known her?"

"Actually, this is our second date. Frankly, I'm a little amazed she agreed to it after the first." He looked around. "I'm sorry. I'm Daniel Faraday."

"Sayid." No need to make this job much easier for him. "And what exactly do you do?"

"I'm a classical pianist. I'm actually here for a Chopin concert."

"An odd choice, given the country we're in."

"Oh, I play some Rossini, Verdi, and Leoncavallo, but Chopin's always been my bread-and-butter. One of the first pieces I ever learned was the Fantasie in C Sharp Minor, and I always feel most at home when I'm playing it." Daniel paused. "Have we met before?"

Sayid was only surprised that it had taken Daniel this long to recognize him. He was considering his next move, when suddenly the musician looked ahead. "Excuse me, she's finally here."

He moved forward to an attractive red-haired woman around his age. "Sorry, I'm late. The conference I was attending ran over, and I needed to go back to my apartment to change."

"And you didn't bother to call?" Daniel sounded more amused than irritated.

"Hey, Leakey is to me what Paganini is to you." She seemed amused as well. "I thought you said that you didn't have any friends in Florence."

"Oh, we just met a couple of minutes ago. Charlotte, this is Sayid. Sayid, this is Charlotte Lewis."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, though it no doubt means my wife and I won't be getting a table any time soon," Sayid gave a small smile.

Daniel thought for a few moments, then walked up to the maitre'd. He only talked to him for a few seconds before the headwaiter walked up to Sayid and told him that he and his wife's table was now available.

"How on earth did you do that?" Nadia asked, with a small amount of amusement.

"I've been eating at this restaurant for the last week, and tipping rather generously," Daniel told them. "I told them if they were going to be so blatant about refusing to seat someone from the Middle East, they could forget about me or anyone else from my company from eating here ever again."

Sayid had been used to the almost casual prejudice many people in the world had against him because of where he was - he'd even encountered some on the island, where you'd have thought that they could all start with a clean slate. Faraday had been the first stranger he'd met who been willing to forego that kind of attitude, and even arguing for him. Perhaps it was because, like him, Daniel was essentially a stranger in a strange land, but very few people would've made even this subtle a gesture. Whatever the reason, he decided to take a chance and invited the two of them to have dinner with he and his wife.

He had expected the musician to say no - after all, he probably wanted to spent time forging a relationship with this woman. Sayid was surprised when neither he nor Charlotte objected and agreed to share a table with him.

The evening had the potential to turn into a disaster, but Sayid was pleasantly surprised to find that he - and apparently everyone else - were having a good time. If Daniel or Charlotte had recognized him, neither made any mention of it during the meal, and though neither he nor Nadia had much knowledge of classical music or anthropology - which, apparently, was what Daniel's date field of interest - both of them managed to explain their subject with such clarity that he didn't feel like a fool.

"I'm curious. How exactly did you get introduced to Charlotte in the first place?" Nadia asked. "I wouldn't think that either of you would travel in the same circles."

Daniel smiled a little at this. "I actually understand it better than you'd think. I really don't like to brag about it, but there was a time when I considered becoming a physicist."

"Really?" Sayid asked.

"At one point, I was on track to become one of the youngest fellows at Oxford." Again Daniel spoke with a self-effacing behavior that should've sounded elitist but he managed to make come across as charming. "But it my final year, I basically realized I wasn't enjoying myself. The pressure was just getting to be too great."

"From your studies?" Charlotte asked.

"No, my mother. When I was still a boy, I had a great deal of musical talent, but she insisted that my primary gift was my mind, and that I had to focus entirely on it. For a long time, I was willing to go along with it. But after more than five years, I finally got it through my head that nothing was ever going to please her. So I dropped out and decided to go back to my first love."

"Well, I've heard you play, and frankly, if your mother couldn't see how gifted you were, you're well done to be rid of her." Charlotte told him firmly.

Daniel gave a small smile. "For the first twenty years of my life, all I did was to try and win my mother's approval. Right now, I could honestly give a damn what she thinks of me." He changed the subject. "Though I am impressed that you managed to know what the right kind of wine to go with the mussels."

"In another life, I was once a sous chef," Sayid told Daniel. "I guess some gifts never quite leave you."

"You're probably right," Charlotte told them. "I haven't watched Star Trek in ten years, and I imagine I could still say a word or two in Klingon if I had to." They all shared a laugh at that. "But we've doing almost all the talking, and frankly, you've barely talked about yourselves. How long have you two known each other."

Both of them knew that they could see the danger here, but so far neither Daniel nor Charlotte had given any sign of recognizing either of them. It wouldn't hurt to give them an expurgated version of the events. "Actually, I've known Sayid since we were children together," Nadia told them. "He used to push me into mud piles."

"I'm pretty sure that's a universal sign of affection in whatever culture you study," Charlotte told them sweetly. "So you're childhood sweethearts, and yet you only got married a year ago. A lot must have gotten in the way for you only to connect now."

"Life and love can be complicated, Charlotte," Sayid told her politely. "Perhaps you and Daniel will figure that out if you stay together long enough."

"We can only hope," Daniel told them. "But then again, I've never been much of a believer in destiny. If there's anything that I learned when I was studying at Oxford, is that there are always variables in any equation."

"Hardly the most romantic comparison you could make, Dan," Charlotte said playfully

Daniel shrugged. "Guess I'm more of a scientist then I thought."

The waiter came by with the check. "I may not believe much in the EU," Charlotte said, 'but that check would've been a lot scarier in lira."

Sayid reached for his wallet, but Dan raised his hand. "You were more than nice to share this meal with us, but I'd have completely failed my duties as a gentleman if I didn't pay for this meal."

"Where exactly are you going to give your next concert?" Nadia asked.

"Well, we're about to give one last performance in Florence," Daniel told them. "Next, we'll go to Milan for a stop at La Scala. After that, we're basically done with Italy. How much longer are you going to be in Italy?"

"Probably another week or so," Sayid told him.

"Well, last show's been sold out, and I'm not important enough to get extra tickets anyway." Dan thought for a moment. "We'll be headed to America sometime in the spring. The promoter's still trying to lock down the schedule, but I imagine at some point we'll be in LA."

The slightest bell of alarm went off in Sayid's head. He was beginning to wonder if he had mentioned to these strangers where he and his wife lived. "How would you get in contact with us?"

"Well, I figured I'd just give you the name of my orchestra, and you'd be considerate enough to give me your email address."

"You wouldn't be inviting Charlotte on this particular tour?" Nadia said, almost coquettishly.

"Maybe after we got to know each other a bit better," Charlotte smiled.

Sayid barely heard this, then he asked Daniel if he could talk to him privately.

"When were you going to admit you recognized me and my wife?"

To his credit, Dan didn't even try to keep up that small pretense. "I didn't know who you were at first. But after you spoke for a little while, I managed to put two and two together. Honestly, though, I figured you were traveling incognito for a reason, and I'm more than willing to respect that."

Suddenly Sayid realized how needlessly intense he'd been ever since he'd returned to civilization - if he wanted to be honest, much of his life. It was understandable given the circumstances of the last few weeks in particular - hell, what had happened to him in Paris was enough to make him distrustful of anyone offering kindness to him - but he had developed a fairly effective bullshit detector, and Daniel Faraday had never set it off. Hell, if anything, he'd been so honest that Sayid actually felt a little ashamed of himself. He'd managed to get much better at trusting people over the past year, and now something as innocuous as a discount on concert tickets - one far in the future - had him ready to snap. "My apologies, Daniel," he said slowly.

"It's quite alright," Dan said calmly. "I've seen how relentless the media can be when they're chasing people who haven't done anything to earn it. "

"I've given up watching the news."

"Can't say I blame you." Dan looked at Sayid. "I'd completely understand if you didn't want to give me your contact information."

"This is one of the more enjoyable evenings I've had in quite some time, and I'm more than interesting to hear you play." Sayid gave him his phone number. "We'll probably be back in Los Angeles in a few weeks. Let us know when your company reaches the states."

Daniel looked over at Charlotte. "Honestly, I'm not completely sure I'll be traveling with them just yet."

Sayid had always been good at reading other people's faces, normally to find weaknesses, but he hadn't quite been used to seeing the look that was on Dan's in quite some time. "Are you sure that you're in love with her?"

"I haven't felt this way about a woman in nearly eight years," Dan told him. "I'm not going to let the opportunity slip through my fingers again. You should know yourself, Sayid."

Despite the pleasant evening, Sayid honestly didn't think that he'd see either one of them again. When he did, he had been glad to be proven wrong.


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Jack had been expecting far more headaches from the media revealing to Seattle Grace that their chief spinal surgeon had been one of the Oceanic survivors. He had been greatly relieved to find out that this was not the case.

Oh, there had certainly been some problems with some of the residents - a couple of them had asked repeatedly what it was like to have to perform trauma surgery on an island. Finally, he had told them straight out that it had been hell. While keeping Boone's name out of it, he had told them how horrible it had been to try and save a patient who he had known was going to die, and whose last several hours on earth had probably been as much agony for the doctor as it had been for the patient. That had shut most of them up.

The attendings had been far more understanding. Bailey and Torres had been more than willing to act as body men - or in this case, body women- to make sure that the last year and a half had been difficult for him, and that, if anything, this made him far more qualified to operate her than anyone else on the staff. Weber, who had admitted that the fact that Jack had been the survivor of a plane crash and subsequent rescue had not factored one iota in his being hired, had been more than clear that Seattle Grace was proud to have him on staff. The only thing he had asked was that Jack considered spending some time with the staff psychiatrist. Jack, who'd had more than his share of nightmares since coming back to civilization, agreed, even though he had been reluctant to share too many details about what happened on the island with a shrink.

After a month had passed, and the media attention had gone back to other, more flashy news stories, Jack had begun to think that he might have undergone the worst of it.

And then, Claire had called him. And had told him that something truly horrible had happened, and that only he could help. And while it didn't involve seeing his dead father, having to push a button every 108 minutes, or John Locke, it only served to remind him that this world was filled with often far more mundane horrors.

"Derek!"

Jack had gotten to know the surgeon who (almost) had the same last name as his well enough over the past five months, but he knew very well that he and the head of neurosurgery weren't friends. To ask him to do what he was going to was going to be a pretty big ask, deserving of an explanation that would require Jack to open doors he really didn't want to open here. But he'd seen the charts. He knew that Claire needed his help. And, despite the fact that he'd only seen her a couple of times since they had gotten back to civilization, he still felt that he owed her.

"Have you got any patients scheduled for the next hour?" he asked.

"I don't have any surgeries for the rest of the day. I was planning to catch some z's." Jack knew the neurosurgeon well enough to know that this meant sneaking in one of the closets for a quickie with Meredith. For two people who had been broken up for more than five months, they sure spent a lot of time screwing.

"I need your help on a consult," Jack told him.

"Need I remind you that we have different specialties?"

"It's neuro, and it's not a patient. It's personal."

Derek considered this for a few seconds. "Someone from your plane?"

"It's more complicated than that." Jack took a deep breath. "Can we go into my office?"

Even though the world knew who the Oceanics were, the story that they had been telling for the past year left little room for maneuverability. Jack knew he was going to have to do some hedging. He just hoped Derek was sensible enough to focus on the case study he was going to hear, and not on how weird the surroundings were.

"When the plane crashed, one of the patients that I had to deal with was young girl around twenty-three. I would later find out that she was eight months pregnant. Her name was Claire Littleton. She'd been flying to LA to give her baby up for adoption. The more time we spent on the island, the more I worried about what was going to happen when she gave birth." Jack took a deep breath. "Ironically, the night that she finally went into a labor, I was busy trying to keep another man from dying from a fall off a cliff. It didn't work, but by some miracle, Claire's child was delivered healthily."

"That was the boy named Aaron, right?"

Jack nodded. "Claire was fairly open about her life. She told us that she never knew her father and that her mother was dead. In point of fact, she wasn't, but it was even worse than we thought. About two years before she got on the plane, Claire and her mother were in an automobile accident. Claire escaped with minor injuries, but her mother ended up in a coma, and the doctors all told her that she would never wake up." He took a deep breath. "Which is why it came as such a shock to her, when she returned to Sydney after we were rescued, and found out that her mother had awakened from her coma about a month before."

This got Derek's attention; he clearly was beginning to get where this story was going. "What the doctors say?"

"They were considerably shocked. At least one doctor had suggested taking her mother off life support, so they were stunned when she finally awoke. There were months of physical therapy, and it was beginning to look like Claire and her mother were getting a happy ending."

"And then?"

"About three weeks ago, Mrs. Littleton began complaining of headaches. She went to the hospital for an MRI." Jack opened the envelope he had been carrying, and put it on the screen. "See for yourself."

Derek took a look. Jack may not have been a neurosurgeon, but he could see for himself that there was a big problem with the scan. There was a small white dot right at the center of the occipital lobe.

"That's one mother of an aneurysm," Derek told him. "Nearly two centimeters. How old are these scans?"

"This is the most recent. Three days ago." Jack told them. "I don't know what the health care system in Australia is like, but they told her that there were only a handful of neurosurgeons in the world qualified to operate, and none of them were on that side of the planet. She's been looking everywhere ever since."

"And she learned about me through you."

This was the weird part. "Actually, she had no idea we were working together. She saw your name online, and thought you and I were related."

Derek raised an eyebrow. "Seriously?"

"We were on a deserted island for three months. The exact spelling of my last name was not a priority." Jack shook his head. "Claire's always been something of a spiritualist - power of dreams, astrology, that sort of thing. She thought that seeing your name in this hospital had to mean something."

"I hope that you didn't make her any promises when she called you."

"I told her that she was mistaking coincidence for fate," Jack admitted. "But I also told her that I couldn't see the harm in showing you her mother's scans. So, now that I've done that, is there anything that can be done for her?"

Derek didn't answer right away. He looked at the scan for several moments. "How old is Miss. Littleton?" he asked first.

"Forty seven," Jack said after glancing at the chart.

"You have the rest of her medical history?"

Jack looked over the files he'd been sent, then handed them over. "Is there an option?"

"I need to look some things up. I'll have an answer for you in a couple of hours." Derek looked at him. "I realize that time is critical. I need a consult, but if there's a solution to this problem, it won't be an easy one."

Jack gave a small laugh. "We're used to not having easy answers."

Derek was as good as his word. Less than two hours late, he was back in Jack's office. Jack was only mildly surprised to see that Meredith Grey was there; all of the snickers about their relationship aside, Meredith was one of the better residents they had.

"I've had a talk with Hahn and Weber. There is a surgery that could potentially save Carole Littleton's life, but it's very risky. Given her previous condition, I'm not wild about performing it, but otherwise I wouldn't think she'll live much longer."

Jack considered telling him he should be telling this to Claire, not to him, but he guessed that Derek respected him enough to tell him that he could be lucid about this. "Go ahead."

"There's a fairly new form of treatment called cryosurgery. Basically, I would lower the patient's body temperature to ninety degrees Fahrenheit, effectively stopping her heart. Once the blood flow to the brain had been stopped, the aneurysm would be far easier to clip. That said, I'd have less than fifteen minutes to do it, or we would risk permanent brain damage. And considering her previous condition, she might very well go into a permanent vegetative state."

Jack considered this for a moment. "I know you're not in the numbers game, but what are the odds of Claire's mother recovering if she survives the surgery?"

"The surgery's been around for nearly a decade," Meredith told him. "They've had a lot of success with it over the last few years. That said, even with someone who was in perfect health, the odds of survival are less than forty percent."

Neither Meredith nor Derek had to tell him how much worse the odds were for a woman who had spent the better part of three years in a coma.

"And not to put a price on this woman's life, but it would be very expensive," Derek told him. "I've looked over her insurance, and my guess, neither Australia's nor ours would be willing to foot the bill for this type of surgery."

"Believe me that part of it isn't a problem," Jack said quickly.

"I don't know about your friend's finances-"

"After we returned from the Pacific, Oceanic paid out a major cash settlement to everybody who came back. I walked away with just under nine million dollars. Because Claire was pregnant when she got on the plane, they were willing to pay her fourteen. Even if that was an issue, there are a lot of people on Oceanic who'd be willing to make sure that she didn't go broke handling this." Jack told them. "So let's get down to the real issue. How serious is the aneurysm?"

Derek exchanged glances with Meredith. "A lot of aneurysms, we describe them as bubbles. This, it's closer to being a balloon. It could burst any time now. And if she does nothing, it's maybe a couple of months before it blows."

Jack took a deep breath. "There's like no luck with some of us." He look at them. "Do you think she could even survive getting here?"

"It would be difficult, no question. And even if we were to do the surgery, it would take her a couple of days just to get here fast enough. Money may not be an issue, but it would take a lot just for her to get from here to Seattle."

Jack looked at Meredith who had been mostly silent throughout this exchange. "If this were any other patient, one that wasn't as close to me, would you advise them to do the surgery?:

Meredith considered this for a moment. "Probably not. But ultimately, this has to be her mother's choice. Not ours, not her daughter's."

Jack had made a lot of progress in the last few months, when it came to self-growth. He had come to realize more and more that he couldn't fix everything, and even if Claire and her mother got onboard with this, it wouldn't be his responsibility. But she was still his friend, and he felt he had to at least try to help her.

"I'm going to have a conference call with her in a couple of hours. I'm still not sure of the time difference, but I have a feeling that it won't matter that much." Jack turned to Derek. "I need you to be as brutally honest as you can be, and I need you to explain just what the chances are."

"She wanted to hear from you," Derek said.

"I don't trust myself to remain impartial," It was more honest than he had been about a medical situation then he'd ever been.

It was now pretty clear that just about everybody's bedside manner at Seattle Grace (with the possible exception of Christina Yang's) was better than Jack's. When Derek and Meredith explained Carole Littleton's condition, the kind of surgery that they would need to do in order to successfully clip her aneurysm, and her best chances even if the surgery was successful, they both managed to remain calm and very matter-of-fact. Considering how worked up Claire had been when she had called him the previous day, Jack was inclined to consider this something of a miracle.

Unfortunately, then came the moment that Jack knew was coming. Claire asked him whether he thought she should have the operation.

For the first time in awhile, Jack thought he knew how to handle this. "Are you asking me as your friend or as your doctor?" he asked.

"I've heard enough medical opinions in the last couple of weeks; I'd be looking for my friend's help."

That didn't make what he was about to say any easier. "Claire, I want you and your family to be happy. I realize that we've all gone through so much - you more than most of us - that to have to deal with this may be a blow that you don't think you can recover from" He looked at Claire's mother. "You just got your daughter back. I can't even pretend to know what that must feel like. You want to have more time with her. And this surgery probably seems like your only option. It really depends on whether you want to risk the time you have left on something that may be more of a gamble."

Mrs. Littleton looked at Claire for a moment, was silent for a few more moments than turned to the view-screen. "How much time would you need to get ready?" she asked, after several long moments, looking at Derek.

"In order to do the prep work, and get the appropriate materials," Derek told her. "Two days."

"I'll make the arrangements with my doctors to get to Seattle," Mrs. Littleton told him.

""Mum, are you sure? They said the flight might end up killing you." Claire told them.

"I've spent far too much time in beds like this one. We just made up. I'm not going to risk losing you and Aaron after all this time. I need to live. Really live. And this operation is the best chance I have at that." Carole looked at Derek again. "Thank you for your help, Doctor Shepherd."

Claire looked at Jack. "Would you mind getting in touch with the rest of our friends?"

"Of course," Jack told her assuredly.

When the connection was turned off a few seconds later, Jack turned to Derek. "I realize that you didn't make any promises, and I'm grateful for that much. But if your committed to performing this surgery, I need to know what the chances really are."

"I will do everything in my power to save your friend's mother," Derek told him. "But honestly, I think that even in a best case scenario, she'll probably die on the table."

Jack considered this for a long moment. "Start doing the prep," he finally told Meredith. "And tell the chief that he's going to need to prepare for a lot of celebrities to be showing up."

"They're all going to come for this?" Meredith asked.

"Everybody who survived the plane crash is basically Aaron's godparents. I'd be surprised if the media didn't know about this before they do."

"You going to be okay for this, Jack? You just got through the latest round of publicity. This is going to bring it all up again."

Jack thought for a moment. "Maybe you should tell Weber that I'll run point for the media. Keep the pressure off you, at least on that front."

"I'd think you'd want to spend time with your friends," Meredith asked. "And with Claire."

"When they get here, I will." Jack told her, then thought for a second. "You have no idea how hard it is, to not be in charge for this kind of thing. I always felt like I had to fix everything. But this, this is something I can't fix. Right now, I think the best thing I can do is do what I can to make your lives easier, at least for a bit."

"All right, I'll talk to Richard."

Jack had no idea how much more stress he was about to feel just by taking a lesser role.

BOISE, IDAHO

Kate Austen had spent so much of the last five years running that she didn't know what it was like to have a normal life. Sawyer had always had her down cold. It was what she did. In retrospect, she now wondered why she had spent so much time on the island trying to get rescued, when the only thing that had ended up doing was having her run away again.

The big difference was, of course, now it was even harder. Half the world knew what she looked like now, and she'd gone from being the target of a single manhunt to being one of the most wanted criminals in the country. And this had led to all sorts of problems, as she had found out the hard way.

When the first anniversary of the Oceanic rescue had come up, everybody in the world knew her face again. But unlike for Sayid, it wasn't merely an inconvenience. She'd had to basically keep moving for two weeks after the first reports came out. You would think that, given the number of terrorists that were making up all the government's watchlist, they wouldn't have wanted to bother with trying to hunt down a twenty-eight year old white woman, whose complete rap sheet was barely a line on Whitey Bulger's resume. But the U.S. Marshal's clearly didn't like the fact that they were having to answer how they could have let such a defenseless appearing woman elude them for three and a half years, then escape custody after returning from being rescued from a plane crash.

Running had been bad enough, but now her options of where to go were even more limited than they had been when she had fled to Australia in the first place. The TSA now had her on the no-fly list, so getting out of the country was now impossible. They knew about her parents, and they also knew about her friends on the West Coast, so that was out. Kevin Callis had been interviewed, so now they knew about her secret identity in Florida, so that entire identity was burned. Indeed, getting false IDs was a lot harder now, considering that everybody knew who she was. She'd been sticking to the less populated states in the Rockies - Wyoming, Montana, and much of the Dakotas as well. She'd been in Idaho for the last few weeks, because it seemed like the publicity was finally starting to die down.

And then, she had been drinking in some cheap bar in Pocatello, trying to figure out what the next step was, when the TV had suddenly been switched to CNN. And she had recognized the face on the screen. It was Claire.

The bartender had been about to switch the channel to a Trailblazers game, when she told him to turn it back. That probably wasn't a smart idea, considering she was trying to keep a low profile, but she could no more have turned her back on this then anyone else.

"... Miss. Littleton's mother will be undergoing a rare type of brain surgery to clip an aneurysm. Miss Littleton, the only one of the Oceanic survivors still living in Sydney, will be accompanying her mother to Seattle Grace-"

As if in a daze, Kate dropped a twenty on the table, and left the bar.

Once again, she heard Sawyer's voice in her head. _You always go back._ Another sign that the con man who had always seemed to have her number knew her better than she knew herself. That's what she had done. She had gone back to see her mother twice after murdering her father, and it had been a disaster both times. She had gone back to get Jack even after he had begged her not to come, and it had very nearly cost them their chance to get off the island. And now, here it was: an event that was certain to have all her friends gathered in one place, a hospital where there were sure to be marshals and lawmen, just hoping that Kate Austen would reappear at the front door.

Yet she was going to be there. All her friends. She had always been alone for so much of her life.

It had hurt a lot when no one had been waiting in Hawaii to see her. Her mother she hadn't expected to be there; Diane Jansen had make it very clear that she didn't give a damn about her daughter any more. But to not see Sam there. The man may not have been her real father, but he had loved her more than that bastard ever had. What had kept from showing his face? His guilt? His sense of right and wrong?

She had wanted to lean on her friends, and yet two months later, she had left all of them without even a proper goodbye. Whose heart had she broken more, she sometimes wondered when she couldn't sleep. Jack or Sawyer? More than once she had wanted to call somebody - Hurley, Sun - hell, they couldn't be tapping phones in Korea waiting for her - but she had held off over and over. And now, they no doubt would all be gathered in Seattle, waiting to see if Claire's mother would survive. Because that's how much Claire meant to all of them.

And Claire had been her friend, too. Hell, she had helped deliver Aaron. Aaron. Wow. He'd be almost eighteen months now. More than a few times, Kate had wondered what Aaron would look like now. And her mind just kept coming up short. Hell, what did she know about babies?

More than that, her mind just kept coming back to Jack and Sawyer. She knew that Jack's specialty was spinal surgery, but she could see him taking over the OR, trying to do everything in his power to fix Claire's mother. And Sawyer - he hadn't known Claire as well as some of the others, but she remembered how Aaron had always stopped crying at the sound of his voice. Would Aaron be crying when he saw his grandmother in a hospital bed? Could he comprehend what was happening to her at all? Did he even remember any of the others?

Going there would be a mistake. She knew that. Even if, by some miracle, the police weren't there, there were sure to be cameras everywhere. Marshall Edward Mars might be moldering in a watery grave as far as the rest of the world was concerned, but there had to be a shitload of fellow officers who wanted to bag the woman responsible for killing him. Kate knew cops. They never let anything go.

For her to try and go there was beyond stupid. Hell, for her to try and just get there would involve six different kinds of crap. And yet Kate knew the moment that she had seen Claire's face on the TV screen that was exactly what she was going to do.

Using any kind of public transportation would be insane. For that matter, she wasn't certain that she could afford it. She had gotten the hell out of Dodge before Oceanic had cashed out those insurance settlements that all her friends had gotten, and she had been scraping by ever since. She had gone hungry more often in the past year than she ever had on the island.

But she had managed to purchase a used car a little more than a month ago. It had taken her six months of saving at four different jobs in three different states, but she now had a small used Chrysler.. The paint was peeling and she was pretty sure that there were more miles on the odometer than it actually was, but it had held together for the last six weeks. So far, it hadn't shown up on any APB's that had been out on her. Hopefully, her luck would hold a little longer.

At least Boise wasn't that far from Seattle, geography wise. She looked at one of the maps of the Western United States. About five hundred miles. If she kept to traveling below the speed limit, and made just a couple of stops along the way, she could be there in less than half a day. Of course, once she got there, she was going to have to confront the problem of how to get into the hospital, but there were always a couple of ways in.

No place was impenetrable, especially not a hospital.

She got into the car, and turned on the radio. "Leaving On Your Mind" came on almost instantly. Of course it did. Patsy Cline was always with her. If she was the kind of person who believed in signs, she would've considered this a good one

She drove slowly as she headed out onto the interstate.

What Kate didn't know was that after she had left the bar, the network had shown pictures of most of the Oceanic survivors. The bartender didn't recognize her face, but one of the other customers was sober enough to realize that the woman on the barstool next to him had been one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted. He called the hotline with dreams of getting a piece of the $100,000 reward that had been posted. No one knew where she was going, but the FBI decided to post a couple of marshals at Seattle Grace just in case.

Kate was about to drive into a trap.


	7. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Considering everything that Jack had had on his plate from the moment Carole Littleton had opted for surgery, he had not gone to much trouble to contact the other Oceanics. Instead, he had made a single phone call to the person who he counted on to make sure that everyone else would know about it: Hurley.

Hurley hadn't known enough of the medical jargon to know exactly what kind of surgery was being performed, but he knew enough from ER that no brain surgery was minor. So he had told Jack not to worry that much on his end and that he would get the rest of the group together. He had only asked one other question that Jack hadn't been able to answer immediately.

"You still know how to reach him?" Jack asked. "I thought he'd gone quiet ever since we were rescued."

"He and his family have been keeping in touch with me ever since we got back to civilization," Hurley told him. "Hasn't been easy, but considering without his wife, we'd still be on the island, I figured we owed it to him."

Jack knew that Charles Widmore had a vested disapproval in his son-in-law - hell, he probably arranged for him to end up on the island in the first place - and that Desmond and Penny had gone to ground to make sure he never found them. For him to show up in one of the most publicity hungry settings was a huge risk, one that Jack would just as soon he not take. On the other hand- "You think that he can make it here in time?"

"Don't know for sure," Hurley admitted. "But he saved Claire's life on more than one occasion. I think he deserves to y'know, make the decision for himself."

"All right then," Jack told them. "In the meantime, call everybody else, and get them up here quick. I'm not sure how quickly the neurosurgery team is going to operate, but my guess is, they'll want to do it as quickly as possible. Claire's going to need as much support as we can give her."

"Dude, I'll take care of it. And as soon as I finish assembling everybody else, I'll be on the next train up." No one needed to mention how much the survivors hated even the idea of flying these days.

Jack then spent the next hour doing a press conference for the hospital explaining the nature of the surgery that the other Dr. Shepherd was about to perform on Claire's mother. He was not entirely surprised that more than half of the questions that the reporters asked him had nothing to do with the radical brain surgery that Derek was about to perform, but rather about him, and more details about what it had been like stranded on an island with her daughter for 100 days.

He was rather grateful that Dr. Weber had decided to do the press conference with him, and was more than willing to try and guide the questions back to the radical surgery that they were going to perform.. Weber was clearly much more gifted in the art of massaging the media better than he did, and after enough questions about the procedure, he declared the press conference over.

"You handled yourself well up there," Weber told him when they were all finished.

"I've had more experience with the press than I would've cared to," Jack responded

"You sure you want to keep doing this? Derek's the one actually doing the procedure; there's no reason that he should have to avoid all of this."

Jack had thought about this for a bit. "Only until Claire and the rest of my friends get here," he told him. "Then, with your permission, I'd like to spend the rest of my time with them. They'll need somebody to explain the nuts and bolts of what's going to happen, and obviously, I'm the best qualified among them."

"You know I can't let them in the observation room when the surgery is taking place," Weber reminded him. "I can let you and Claire in, but that's as far as the regulations allow."

Jack knew that even letting the patient's daughter into the observation deck was a major breech in protocol, and the fact that he was being allowed it at all was a lot of latitude even for a doctor who'd only been at Seattle Grace for less than eight months. He knew that this was more due to his celebrity status then anything else, and this was one of the rare occasions that he hadn't minded leaning on that more than usual.

"I appreciate all the courtesy that you've been allowing us," he told his boss.

"Don't thank us yet, Jack." Weber reminded him. "All we've done so far is agree to perform this surgery. The rest is up to Derek."

Jack's tension must have shown. "I just wish that there was something more that I could do."

"You were in the right place at the right time." Weber told him. "Maybe that will be enough to help save this woman's life. I'm not a particularly religious man, but if I were, I might consider this a sign."

"I'm not that kind of person," Jack admitted, "but in this case, maybe I'll consider it."

For the first time in a while, Jack allowed himself to think of John Locke. If he had been there, no doubt he would've thought that this was fate acting out. But then, of course, Locke wasn't here. He had stayed behind on the island, sure that it was his destiny, sure that he had been brought there for a reason.

He shook it off. John wasn't there. Fate and destiny had nothing to do with anything any more. Science had diagnosed Carole Littleton's aneurysm. And that same science was the only thing that could save her.

Not all the Oceanics had come to lend their support to Claire and her mother, but more than half of the survivors had. Some of them - Hurley, the Kwons, Sayid and Nadia - now lived in the LA area, and had all come up together. In fact, as things turned out, they ended up arriving in Seattle nearly half a day before the Littletons did. They had tried to stay under the radar, but when you were as big a celebrity as Hugo Reyes was, it was very difficult to be incognito, and the press hadn't even had to try that hard to find a hotel clerk that was willing to sell out whatever confidentiality arrangement they had with their clientele. The paparazzi descended on them even before they had a chance to get to the hospital, which meant that it had been a bitch getting down to Seattle Grace.

It was then that Hugo demonstrated the advantage of not living like a multi-millionaire. He rented one of the cheaper SUVs that they had and managed to sneak most of their party there before most of the media had realized who they were supposed to be chasing. Then, with some additional help from Jack, they had managed to get in through one of the subbasements, and into the hospital. There they found that Jack wasn't the only familiar face.

"How on Earth did you manage to sneak in?" Sayid asked Sawyer.

"It's all thanks to Blondie here," Sawyer pointed to Juliet. "Most of those sons of bitches are so busy looking for us, they seem to have forgotten that she was even involved, or that she happened to have an M.D. after her name."

"I classified this as a business trip. Technically speaking, I'm here to visit a colleague of mine," Juliet said with a trace of her old smugness. " It's just a coincidence that I brought my boyfriend with me, and that an old friend of his happens to be here as well."

"Don't tell me you billed your hospital for this," Sun said with a small amount of wit.

"Why? I paid for our airfare and rental car," Sawyer told her. "But enough about that. Where the hell are the Littleton family?"

Sawyer must have been more worried then he let on - he hadn't used any of his nicknames for Claire or Aaron. "Their plane landed in Seattle less than two hours ago," Jack told them. "They're getting a Medivac chopper to fly them the rest of the way."

Hurley looked a little concerned. "Dude, you sure that's the best way for them to get here?"

"You really want them coming through the mosh pit that is our ambulance bay right now?" Jack pointed out "Airspace is clear, and we'll be able to handle the media a lot better as long as they don't have to come in that way."

"Did you get any reports on Miss Littleton's condition when her plane landed?" Juliet, still calm in a crisis, asked.

"Right now, every thing seems to be going okay. But we're going to have to run a series of test ASAP when she gets in." Jack told them. "I'll do my best to keep you guys updated, but you're going to have a lot of waiting. This isn't going to be fun."

"Waiting around with no idea what's going to happen next. Gee, that sounds familiar." Sawyer smirked. "Actually, I'm a little surprised you're not running the whole thing by now."

"The neurosurgeon who's going to be operating on Claire's mother is one of the best in the country, if not the world. The hospital we're standing in right now was ranked number three in the country in the last major survey. Honestly, if I were to try and interfere with them, Derek Shepherd would just kick my ass out. I can do a lot more good for Claire right here."

Sun and Sawyer both looked at Jack a little strangely at first, before Sun spoke first. "You really have come a long way, Jack."

"I guess that's what they call personal growth." Now everyone was looking at Sawyer. "What? I'm not the only one who sees a shrink "

Just then, Lexi Grey and George O'Malley, the two interns that Jack had requested shadow him over the course of the day, showed up. "Dr. Shephard, the Littletons chopper is less than two minutes out."

"All right. I want you to make sure Miss Littleton's room is ready, and make sure that all the CAT scans are ready ASAP. " Jack looked around. "I assume you've read the briefings and you know who these people are; I want you to keep them and Claire when she gets here with constant updates." He turned back to George. "O'Malley, you're with me."

George nodded and came with him. "You do know that I'm still not in the same grade level as Meredith or Alex," he reminded him.

"Everything you've demonstrated has made it clear that's a technicality more than anything else," Jack told him. "Any student can do stitches or take a test. You have the gifts of a healer, George. Don't let one failed exam make you think otherwise."

Lexie Grey knew that, among her other qualifications, one of the reasons that Jack had picked her to do help him handle the holdover with the other survivors of the plane crash was her photographic memory. He had given her a briefing folder yesterday night, and she had managed to match names with the faces of the more than two dozen survivors who had shown up to support their friend. She had thought that she was prepared for anything.

Which is why she had been very surprised to see a tall man with brown hair appear on the main floor of the hospital, and tentatively approach the receptionist. "Excuse me, I'm looking for Carole Littleton's room.", he said with a heavy Scottish accent.

"Name,"

"Hume. Desmond Hume."

The receptionist looked on the screen in front of her. "Are you friend or family?"

Desmond looked a little puzzled, and so did Lexie - as far as she knew, there was no one of that name associated with the Oceanic survivors.

It therefore came as something of a shock when James Ford emerged from Carole's room, saw Desmond, walked slowly across the room, and hugged him. "Holy crap, Scotty, didn't think you'd show."

"You know how much Charlie meant. That goes for the people he left behind."

Ford looked around. "Wife around?"

"She's at the harbor. Figured it was safer for her to stay there for the moment."

At that point, Claire, who had only settled with her mother in her room ten minutes earlier, emerged to see what the fuss was about. When she saw Desmond, the shadow that had clouded her face ever since she got here lifted a little. Lexie, who was frankly still baffled by the conversation that had passed, was even more astounded when Claire walked over to him, and embraced Desmond with even more fierceness than the bigger James had.

Clearly the man was some kind of personal friend of the Oceanics, and judging by the name, they were talking about Charlie Pace, the guitarist for DriveShaft who had perished before the rescue. But the rest was somewhat baffling. Did the other Doctor Shephard know what this was about? Had he invited him?

"Look, it's getting kinda crowded in Miss Littleton's room, so maybe we should take this somewhere else before we do anything more exhausting?" Ford was saying.

"Yeah, you're right." Claire turned to Lexie. "Is there some kind of common area where we can get caught up before they have to take my mother in?" she asked.

Lexie considered this for a couple of moments, then said: "There's a conference room just beyond the main desk," she told them. "I, um, don't mean to be a pain, but I don't know if Mr. Hume was on the VIP list?"

"We weren't a hundred percent he'd be able to make it in time," Jack Shephard, mercifully had reappeared. "Mr. Hume and his family spend most of their time overseas, and I didn't think that they'd be able to get here in the window available. But he's more than welcome to be here."

"All right." Lexie told them.

Jack moved right over. "Derek's at the MRI. I need you to get Miss Littleton over there right now. We need to know what exactly we're up against."

This, at least, Lexie was more comfortable with. "Gotcha." She started heading out, Dr. Shephard right behind her. "If you don't mind me asking, how exactly does Mr. Hume fit into all this?"

"He's a personal friend of mine." An odd smile appeared on Jack's face. "I knew him in another life."

Hurley, who had always seemed comfortable even when stranded on a tropical island, seemed a lot more ill at ease than he had in all the time that they had known him. Considering that all of the focus was on Claire and her mother, he didn't want to seem like he was taking attention away from his friend. But eventually, it became clear to Juliet that something was bothering him, and she sat next to him.

"Something bothering you, Hugo?" she asked.

"I just really hate hospitals," was all that he would say for a few minutes. "Didn't your file on me tell you this?"

Juliet had the good grace to be quiet for a moment. "It just had names and dates. It never told us what it was about."

Hurley considered this. "Eight years ago, I was at a party. I stepped on this deck that was already packed with people." He took a deep breath. "It broke, and it fell, and, two people died."

The young man was so cheerful all the time, Juliet was actually astounded to see how close he was to tears he was. Not for the first time, she realized how much Ben Linus had done to rob them of their humanity. She had known about this incident from Hugo's files, but that had just been words on a page.

"After that, I just sort of - went catatonic for awhile. Mom put me in Santa Rosa, and I was there for nearly ten months before I got better." Hugo looked pretty shaky. "I've never really been comfortable in one since."

Juliet considered this for a few moments. "I was a fertility doctor when I came to the island. Telling a woman she was pregnant was supposed to be the happiest day in their life. Then Ben brought me to the island to solve their problems. And I couldn't, and I watched nine women die in three years." She looked around. "It took a lot of work for me to be comfortable in a hospital again."

Neither one of them was talking about Claire, but they didn't have to. She had been symbolic of a lot to both of them, so if her mother was in bad shape, it struck both of them as an incredibly bad omen. They also knew Jack wouldn't be rushing this along as quickly as he was if the circumstances weren't so dire.

"This is bad, right?" Hurley said slowly. "I mean, all surgery on your brain sucks, but this is , like, a lot more important, so it's gotta be like, twice as dangerous, right?"

"Fertility specialist, remember?" Juliet said with a small smile.

"I really shouldn't be around her, right now." Hurley told them. "Claire really doesn't need the bad luck."

Now Juliet looked puzzled. "What are you talking about?"

It was odd. Everything that had happened over the last couple of years, and Hurley still couldn't talk to anybody about his curse or about the numbers. He had thought that they had stopped chasing him, and mostly they had, but he hadn't helped but notice that Carole Littleton was staying in room 416. He was about to make a suggestion - he didn't know what - but then Dr. O'Malley reappeared.

"We just finished the most recent scans of Miss Littleton," he told them.

"How bad is it?" Hurley asked.

"Neurosurgery isn't my specialty, but Meredith and Dr. Shepherd think that we need to get Miss Littleton into the OR as soon as possible." O'Malley told them.

Juliet looked around. There were no nurses around the room. "So why haven't they gone in?"

"Miss Littleton said she wanted to talk to her daughter and the other Dr. Shephard alone." George told them, clearly as puzzled as they were but not for the same reasons.

Jack knew that every extra second that Carole spent talking with them could prove potentially fatal. He also knew that the doctors in Australia as well as Derek had to have told her just how dangerous this was, and yet Carole clearly had to talk to her daughter in order to say her goodbyes in case she didn't come out alive. He assumed that he was there just for her mother to say thank you.

"You don't have to lie to me about how risky this surgery is," Carole told him. "I've already survived a lot worse than that just coming here. The last year I've gotten with my daughter and my grandson have been more than a reward. Surviving this surgery would be gravy."

"Don't talk that way, Mum," Claire was saying. It was clearly taking all her energy just to hold back tears.

"That's not why I asked to talk to you, Dr. Shephard." Carole swallowed nervously "There's something that you're entitled to know. Something that I haven't even told Claire yet."

Now Jack was clearly puzzled.

"A long time ago, I had a relationship with a married man. I knew that he had a family, but I couldn't help myself, and neither could he." Carole took a deep breath. "Even though he lived in America, we were together for three years. Long enough for us to have a child together. Your aunt Lindsey never approved, wanted me to give you up for adoption, but I kept you, and I kept him. Then he stopped coming."

Suddenly, a horrible picture was coming together in Jack's head. But he needed to hear Miss Littleton confirm it for himself. "Who was he?"

"His name was Christian. He was your father." Carole looked at Claire. "Jack is your half-brother."

Jack risked a look at Claire. She looked incredibly stunned, but somehow she didn't seem surprised. Was that who his father had gone to see when he had headed to Australia on that last trip before he died? Was she the reason that he had ended up on Oceanic 815?

"W- why are you telling me this, Mum?" Claire was clearly trying to hold back tears.

"Because there's a very good chance I may die." Carole told her daughter. "And even if I survive, you deserve to know that you have family beside me in this world. Some kind of fate put the two of you on that plane together. Maybe it was so that the two of you could finally take care of each other."

At that moment, Derek entered the room. "Miss Littleton, we really need to get started."

"It's all right." Miss Littleton told her family. "I've said what I needed to say."

Jack would later on realize how much courage it had taken for her to do what she had just done. Yet for quite a while afterwards, a part of him would still end up hating her for bringing this subject up at a moment when all of them were at their most vulnerable.

After everything that he had gone through getting this surgery together, George had been certain that Dr. Shephard would be heading to the observation room to make sure every element of the surgery was under his eye. George liked this Dr. Shephard; he had taken him under his wing in a way that no other attending at this hospital had, but the fact remained the man was something of a control freak - not necessarily the worst quality for a surgeon.

Yet after a few moments, he didn't follow Derek and Meredith up into OR 3, which had been booked solid for the last fourteen hours. Instead, he walked towards Claire with what looked to be a dazed expression on his face. George didn't recognize it, and after a few moments, he realized why: he'd never seen a look like that on Jack's face in all the time he'd known him.

Another intern might have tried to tactfully remind Jack of the schedule, but with the empathy that so many of the other doctors mocked, he realized that his attending clearly needed a moment. He hadn't been in the room when Miss Littleton had been talking to her daughter, but it was pretty clear that the patient had dropped one hell of a bombshell.

Jack looked towards Claire. "Did you know?" was all he could manage to say.

Claire Littleton looked like she was on the verge of tears herself, which given the circumstances was understandable. But what she said next was even more stunning than what George had thought.

"Four years ago" she began slowly, "right after the accident, a man came to the hospital where Mum was being treated. He told me that he was my father, and that he had stopped coming because my Aunt Lindsay disapproved. He told me that there were ways to take my mother off life support that weren't against the law. And I told him to go to hell. He never even told me his name, and I told him I didn't want to know it. I didn't know who he was until after we got rescued, and I saw his picture at his memorial."

Jack was clearly overcome when he heard all this. "My father... he never believed in that kind of stuff. He was adamantly opposed to physician assisted-" He couldn't finish the sentence.

"I spent years thinking that my father was dead," Claire told him, "and when he only comes by to tell me to - kill my mom-" She was clearly in a lot better control of herself then Jack was. "I never even told my mom that. How could I tell you?"

Jack took another deep breath. Once again, George really wished he wasn't always becoming privy to information the patients clearly didn't want them to know. There was a small, rather petty part that was a little relieved to know that the soap opera element that seemed to surround this hospital wasn't entirely limited to him. But it was rather tiny, and he managed to quash it.

Instead, he coughed gently, and said: "Dr. Shephard?"

It was a long several moments before Jack gathered himself - George could swear he heard Jack count to five - before he looked at him. Suddenly, he seemed to remember where he was, and he said quietly: "Dr. O'Malley, I assume I can count on your discretion?"

George really didn't like being asked to keep secrets. However, since he didn't know all the details, and he was pretty sure not even Christina or Izzie could figure this one out without a lot of help, he had no problem saying: "Of course."

"I'm going to go make sure there are no problems with your mother's surgery." Jack said slowly. He got to his feet, and walked towards the door, before turning to George again. "Would you please talk to the Chief and see what conditions are necessary to get family to observe?"

George considered this. "Patients aren't allowed-"

"I'm not talking about only the patient's. I'm talking about my sister."

Part of George wished he hadn't learned that. Then he saw the hopeful look on Claire's face, and was glad he had.

Kate hated hospitals. Her mother had managed to hide Wayne's abuse a lot better than some other battered wives, but Wayne had gotten - enthusiastic - more than once, and Diane had gone in half a dozen times at least. Each time, a social worker had come in, noticed the bruising, and had tried as gently as possible that it might not be the safest thing in the world for her or her daughter to return home. And each time, Diane had firmly told them that it was an accident, making the hole in Kate's heart a little bigger each time.

Hospitals caused more pain than they healed. And that had been long before she had returned to St. Louis when her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. That had been the last time she had ever seen her, and just as she had promised, the first thing she had done was scream for help. Kate didn't even know if her mother was alive any more. And a tiny part of her - the part that was no doubt part of her biological father - didn't really care any more.

And now, she was staring at another one- granted a much nicer one than the one in St Louis, but a hospital all the same. She didn't know the patient, but that didn't change the fact that she had to get in there. That didn't change the fact that it was going to be a hell of a lot harder to get into than the other hospitals she'd been to. She didn't see any signs of the U.S. Marshals or any other law enforcement agencies, but there were a shitload of reporters vans waiting outside. They might not be here to see if wanted fugitive Kate Austen would show up, but they all knew what she looked like, and the minute the cameras were turned on her, every policemen within twenty miles would converge on Seattle Grace.

There had to be a way into the hospital. The obvious person to contact would be Jack, but he was no doubt somehow involved in Claire's mother surgery. If anything happened that could prove distracting, she would never forgive herself. Claire probably would be willing to help, but she no doubt had enough to worry about as it was. Almost everybody she knew from the plane was in the building, and she did still have their numbers - but even though all of them had learned a lot about how to think in a crisis on the island, she wasn't sure how any of them would be able to get her into the building.

No, really, there was only one person she could count on to get her inside, and even then considering, one of the first things she done before getting here was break his heart, she knew that there was a risk in doing it.

Reluctantly, she started dialing.

Jack had looked awfully distracted when he had walked in, which was understandable considering the pressure that he was going to be under, but he had asked Juliet to help run relays between her and the OR. Considering her background, that made sense.

So James Ford was a little at loose ends when his cell started vibrating. And even though he hadn't heard from her since she disappeared, he somehow instinctively knew who it was before he read the text message.

"Son of a bitch."


	8. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The second reaction that James had when he read Kate's text message to him was even simpler. "Of course."

Of course it made sense that Kate was here. It was what she did, after all. She always ran away, and she always came back. Granted, there had been a much longer gap between when he had last heard from her and now, but when there was trouble that was what she did.

James knew she hadn't come back to see him or to see Jack, for that matter. She had come to see Claire. They had always been pretty close on the island - hell, Kate had been Aaron's midwife - and having heard on the damn news that her mother was in the hospital, she had come back to support her friend. Never mind that all of those cameras were going to be turned on her the minute she stepped foot in this hospital.

No, she hadn't come to see him. So why had that simple text message caused his heart to skip?

' _Sawyer: I need to get in. Please help me.' K_

No one called him Sawyer any more. He had managed to get rid of that name once for all when he left that island. Even Hurley had managed to stop calling him that after the last few weeks. Kate had never gotten the memo.

He tried to shake it off. He was with Juliet now. Christ, how the hell was he going to tell her that Kate was here? For that matter, it wasn't like he was going to be able to keep this secret from everybody else. God help them when Hurley found out.

And how could he get her into this hospital? It wasn't like he'd been a bank robber when he'd broken the law. Sure, he knew how to shed a tail, but that was getting out of places, not getting into them. And he didn't know much about how a hospital worked to begin with...

Oh, hell.

No, he didn't know how a hospital worked. But Juliet did. This just kept getting better and better.

Jack was clearly upset about something. He'd never been that good at hiding his pain before he'd come to the island, and it was even more obvious now. Juliet had always been good at reading him - she'd almost been in love with him for that reason - and he was looking at the operating table with an intensity that did not at all fit the way one looked at a relative stranger.

Not that what was happening wasn't distracting enough. There was a fairly extensive team of surgeons in the middle of a big procedure. They been effectively running ice through the veins of Carole Littleton to reduce her body core temperature. According to Jack, doing this was the only way to make the aneurysm visible enough for him to clip. Of course, doing so was going to basically stop the patients heart, and render her clinically dead. It would only be for about ten minutes, according to the literature, but that was more than long enough to cause brain damage - assuming they would be able to start her heart again after the surgery. They'd made improvements in this kind of procedure over the past ten years - but dead was still dead.

Not for the first time, Juliet was beginning to wonder if Jack was thinking about the island. She had never taken much stock in the gospel according to Ben - especially considering how many patients she'd lost in the three years that she'd been there - but apparently it had the ability to heal all ills. But then again, considering that Jack had to remove a cancerous tumor from Ben, he probably wouldn't have believed it either.

"How long is this going to take?" Juliet asked Jack, more for the purposes of distraction than because she was really curious.

Jack didn't answer for a moment. "Probably twenty, thirty minutes. As surgeries go, it's not that extensive. Recovery's going to be a bigger problem. But they're going to have to do this step by step."

"Jack, are you okay? You seem a little out of it yourself."

Jack looked at her again. This time he took an even longer pause. "When you got those files on us, how extensive were they?"

Of all the questions he could've asked her, that one had to be at the bottom of the list, right below: "What's Sawyer like in bed?" It took her several seconds to wonder how to answer it before she could even formulate a response.

"There was a station on the island. It was responsible for communications with the outside world. Mikhail - the Other who killed Charlie - was responsible for it. He gathered all the data that he could assemble on every survivor of that flight."

Were there reporters in this room? Were the other doctors aware of the fact that they were getting the story of a lifetime? Juliet didn't know and wasn't sure she cared.

"You knew who Sarah was. You knew who she was sleeping with. That's not exactly the kind of information you get off MySpace." Jack asked.

"I don't know where he got the information from," Juliet admitted. "Frankly, I didn't really care that much. Ben was very particular about what he told us. Jack, what is this about?"

Once again, Jack was revealing how bad he really was at hiding his emotions. He was swallowing repeatedly, and he seemed on the verge of tears. But even that was less startling than the question he asked next. "Did you have any files on Claire?"

Perhaps she shouldn't have been that surprised the question had been about her. In truth, despite the fact that Ethan's abduction of Claire had been one of their priorities, Ben had cared less about trying to find any information about her than how to make sure that they had been able to take possession of her unborn child. Even after she had escaped and given birth, Ben had never seemed interested in reclaiming her or Aaron, or even trying to bring about retribution to whoever had allowed her to escape in the first place. But then again, Ben had more pressing matters on his mind - or rather his spine.

She gave Jack the abbreviated version of this story, but he still seemed unable to tell her what exactly was troubling him. Before she could press him still more, her cell phone started buzzing. When she had shut it off, Jack just said. "You should get back to everybody else."

"Jack, are you sure you're okay?"

At that moment, the door to the observation room opened. Dr. Lexie Grey emerged with Claire right behind her. "I know you've gotten permission to be here, but are you certain about this, Miss Littleton?" Grey was saying.

What the hell was going on? Juliet wasn't a surgeon, but she knew for damn sure that patient's family weren't allowed in this room. Why on earth would Jack allow this?

She turned back to Jack who, in the space of a few seconds, had managed to turn his professional face back on. "It's okay, Juliet. Everybody else will be worried."

 _Like you're not?_ But there was no point in her lecturing Jack on whatever secret he was holding on to. He'd tell it when he was good and ready, and this was literally the last possible time for her to talk about it.

Looking over at Claire, who seemed to be having a hard time herself (but given what was going on, that was understandable) she very slowly walked out of the room.

And ran right into James. "How the hell did you get up here?" she said almost without thinking.

"How's the surgery going?" James asked instead. It was a perfectly valid question, but Juliet could tell it was one of the last things on her boyfriend's mind.

"As well as can be expected. From what Dr. Weber is telling me, the harder part is just ahead." Juliet fixed James with the same one she'd given to him on far more vital situations. "Now why are you really up here?"

She expected some kind of stall - Jack had done the same thing rather than tell her what was really bothering him - but as he always proved, James wasn't Jack. "I just got a text message from Kate."

Now it felt like her heart had stopped beating for a moment. Ever since Kate had disappeared nearly a year earlier, she had always wondered whether she would ever come back to break her heart. She had been with James for more than eight months - twice as long as Kate could ever have been with him - but she had known that the convict had always had a place in his heart that she just couldn't reach. Even as she and James had gotten into a fairly deep relationship, she wondered if Sawyer had ever stopped waiting for her to come back.

"What does she want?" she seemed to hear herself asking.

James showed her the text. "My guess is she's here to see Claire. Only reason she'd have popped up from Bumfuck, Alaska or wherever the hell she's been hiding the last year."

Of course. This had been all over the news. And Kate, being Kate, was preparing to walk into the lion's den to try and offer help to a friend. Never mind the fact that the last thing Claire - or any of them - needed was to have a wanted fugitive wander into a hospital where it seemed the entire media was huddled up waiting for something to happen. "Have you told anyone else?" she asked.

James had the good grace to look embarrassed. "Really didn't know who else to talk to. If I told Hugo, ball games over right then. Sun and Jin probably couldn't help much. Thought about asking Sayid, hell, maybe I will anyway. But this kind of mission doesn't call for anyone getting hurt." He looked at Juliet. "You're the only one here who knows how a hospital works."

"You could've asked Jack," she pointed out.

"Last thing Doc needs is to know the woman who broke his heart is in the building with him."

"He's not going to be much happier if he finds out about it on CNN," Juliet argued.

"Shit! Didn't think about that."

 _Of course not. You were dwelling on the fact that the woman who ripped your heart out of your chest was in the building._ That was cruel, and a little unfair. The old James would've just tried to get Kate into the building himself, and then only told her about it when they got caught. She decided to try and offer a certain amount of compassion.

"Right now, Claire is in there watching them cut into her mother's head." James seemed kind of appalled at that, so she moved on. "You have any idea where Kate is?"

"All I did was tell her to hold on. " Her exasperation must have shown, because he told her: "Shit, you got a better idea, I'm open to suggestions."

The thing was, Juliet wasn't sure she had one. Then, suddenly, something did. It wasn't a great idea, but it was an idea, and as much as she really disliked Kate, she figured that there might be a way after all. "Is Desmond still down there?"

George had done enough research on this particularly kind of surgery to know that while it was definitely high risk, the actual operation wasn't going to take that long. The real problem would come not only resuscitating Carole Littleton, but in waiting for her to regain consciousness.

The fact that he expected Meredith and the other Dr. Shepherd to be moving to recovery within the hour didn't do much to relieve the stress for the survivors of Oceanic 815. It had been clear that pressure had been getting to them. James Ford had left a few minutes earlier to go up and get an update himself, and had yet to return. The Kwons were apparently a bit concerned as well, and had asked him if he would mind getting them some information. George had agreed to head upstairs, and had been surprised not only to see that there was no sign of Ford, but also no sign of Juliet Burke, the fertility specialist that Jack had given permission to ask the surrogate between the OR and the other survivors.

Lexie wasn't much help, though she did tell him that Derek had managed to clip the aneurysm. Normally, that would've been sufficient good news for him to head back downstairs or at least wait back in the OR until Miss Littleton had been revived. But Lexie had been more than a little surprised that Juliet had left the observation room, and hadn't come back. She was equally curious to find out why the hell the Chief had decided to let the patient's daughter to watch the procedure. "This is the kind of thing that they created the medical code of ethics for," she had reminded George. "The last thing I would've wanted to see was to watch my mother die on the operating table. You know that as well as I do."

Had Alex or Cristina or even Meredith asked him this, he probably would've stonewalled them. But because he had been through the exact same thing not that much longer ago that Lexie had, and because they were still interning together, he felt more inclined to share. "You can't tell anyone else about this yet, but I'm pretty sure that Claire Littleton is Jack's sister."

Lexie considered this for a couple of moments, then really said the only thing that could be considered appropriate. "What the fuck? Did he tell you this?"

"I think he just found out before her mother went under the knife." George was even more stunned now that he said this out loud. He was now realizing, of course, that Claire and Jack had apparently been on Oceanic 815, been on an island in the Pacific for 100 days, gotten back to civilization, and had only found out about this _now._ "Holy crap," he muttered to himself.

Lexie seemed on the verge of asking another question that he was pretty sure that he wouldn't be able to answer, when she looked over his shoulder, and spotted Juliet and James, looking around talking to another person who he couldn't put a name to. "Who the hell is that?" George asked.

"His name is Desmond Hume." Lexie said quietly. " Jack said that he knew him from back in LA. Said they were old friends."

"How does he know those two?" George asked.

"I'm not sure," Lexie admitted. "There's certainly no reason that they would be conspiring like thieves. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure how Dr. Burke would know him, either."

This was just getting weirder, but really this was not something that was any of their business. George had been about the only one of original interns who was taking seriously Jack's idea that they had no business getting involved in what patients were going through, let alone what visitors were up to. Then again, considering what he had just learned about the other Dr. Shephard...

"Check in on the operation. I'll see what's going on here."

Lexie nodded.

"Are you sure this is the best idea, brutha?" Hume was asking.

"No, I'm pretty sure it's a shitty one. But right now, it's the best one we have." Ford had a bizarre look that George couldn't quite place on his face.

"More importantly, are you sure you want to do this Desmond?" Juliet asked him. "This happens, there's a pretty good chance that you end up going public. That happens, your father-in-law is going to know where you are."

Three people talking in vague terms about something he didn't understand. Was that what all the patient's thought when they heard the residents talking about their sex lives? George was beginning to see Jack's point.

"I'm not afraid of him pushing me around anymore," Hume said boldly. "But let's not worry about that right now. Do you know how to get in touch with her?"

"She's been waiting on my response for half an hour," Ford told him "We'll be lucky if she hasn't decided to try and break in on her own."

A very vague picture was beginning to form in George's head. About half of the Oceanic survivors had come to Seattle Grace. But there had been some kind of memo going around that there was at least one person who everybody was supposed to keep an eye out for. Unfortunately, most of that had been passed on to the residents and the attendings. The interns, the actual people on the floor, who probably had more contact with the patients than anybody else, had been left out of the loop.

But George hadn't gotten this far without being able to hang onto some details. He might not know what she looked like, but he remembered Katherine Austen's name. By pure coincidence, it was the same name as one of the pioneer cardiac surgeons in the country. And now it seemed that some of her old friends were going to try and sneak this fugitive into the hospital. He wasn't sure of Austen's guilt or innocence, but he knew enough to know that her showing up in the hospital would turn what had been a media event into a full-blown circus.

He knew that he should tell somebody, if not Weber or an attending, at least Cristina or Alex. They would at least know who to look for, and could help him figure out what to do next. But the sad truth was, with the exception of Izzie (and it had been really hard talking to her ever since he had separated from Callie) none of them seemed to regard him with the same respect any more. It was as if, just because he had been a repeater, he now mattered less to them than the doctors they were studying with, or the surgeries that they were trying to scrub in on.. There was a residual bitterness in him that he had managed to stow away most of the time, but that nevertheless felt like a kick in the groin. And the worst part was, they didn't even seem to notice that they were doing it. It was as if the year they had spent together was meaningless.

George tried to shake off the feeling of self-pity that had just overcome him. This was literally the last thing that he needed to be thinking about right now. But it did point out that his options were limited. He now knew that Ford, Hume and Juliet (he refused to think of the blonde as Dr. Burke) were somehow going to try and get Kate Austen into the hospital. That would be a neat trick, considering the circumstance.

Then Lexie reentered. "They're reviving her," she told him. "You figure up what they're up to?"

What the hell. He had to trust somebody, and Lexie and he had been becoming good friends. And considering what she had told him one night at the bar, she might be the best equipped to help. "When they showed you the file of the attendees, was Kate Austen's photo in it?"

Lexie frowned. "Yeah, but I'm not sure why. She's been a fugitive for the last year."

"Would you recognize her if you saw her?" Lexie nodded. "Okay, this next bit is going to be tricky. I need you to go to the ground floor. Check on Mr. Lawrence." Lawrence was one of the coma patients in the ICU His condition had been unchanged for more than two months. He was so close to permanent vegetative state that interns were tasked with checking up on him daily.

This was odd and Lexie picked up on it. "This seems like a really odd time for-"

"I'm not finished. When you're there, I need you to call a code. When they ask you about it, I want you delay them as long as you can."

This was getting really weird. "George, what are you going to be doing while this is going on?"

"I need to talk with security. We may be able to do something to catch a wanted fugitive."

The pieces were starting to come together - Lexie was not a fool. "We could get in a lot of trouble for this," she reminded him.

George actually managed to laugh a little at this. "What's the worst that can happen to us? We're already at the bottom of the totem pole."

He didn't know - no one on the staff would've known - that he was about to do something that would scotch his relationship with the attending he was almost friends with.

The surgery had been successful, and Carole Littleton was headed towards recovery. Jack knew that he should be more cheerful about this considering the level of risk associated with the procedure, and the fact that he had promised Claire that Derek could 'fix' her.

But the sad truth of the matter was that he had never been less focused on a medical procedure in his life. Admittedly, he hadn't been in the OR, which given his state of mind was probably a good thing. But now that it was over, he had to go through the process of dealing with what Claire's mother had told him. He knew that she had only told him because a part of her had been sure that she might be about to die. But she hadn't - though admittedly, they still weren't clear if she'd recover. And it was time to admit that he hadn't been particularly clear-headed about what had happened. Letting Claire watch them operate - that was the kind of thing that could get him in a world of trouble even though the procedure had been a success. There was still a pretty good chance that he could end up being severely disciplined, though considering some of the things the _interns_ had been able to get away with -

Just then, Meredith walked up to him. "How long will it be before we know?" he asked her, almost as a reflex.

"We'll check in on her in a couple of hours. See what kind of progress she's made. But the operation was textbook."

Jack gave a grim smile. "We all know how often routine procedures can go ballsup."

"I know you have reason to be invested in this one, but you've got to have confidence in the science." Meredith looked like she was about to walk away, but then Jack hesitated.

"When did you find out that you had another family?" he asked.

Meredith clearly was caught flatfooted by the question. "Last year, when my father came to the hospital to watch his daughter give birth."

Jack knew Meredith well enough to know that the only person she really considered 'family' was her late mother. She had been working in the same hospital with Lexie for nearly six months, and Jack had barely heard the two of them have more than a handful of conversations, even when he asked Lexie to be one of his interns for the media event. He'd considering her behavior cold, and had had problems talking with her about it. Now, however, considering they were in the same boat, he felt like he had to try and find out what you did when you had family you didn't know existed.

"Why do you have so many problems getting along with your sister?" God, had that come out wrong. "I'm sorry. It's just, you never seem to even make eye contact, and you're family

Meredith didn't answer for several seconds. For a moment, Jack thought that he had truly offended her, and that she would walk away without saying another word to him. "My mother never talked about my father," she finally said. "There was no reason that she should have. She made it clear very early on that he didn't fight for her. Of course, it wasn't until much later that I found out that she had other reasons for not caring about him."

Jack had heard gossip to that effect - something to do with Dr. Weber and Ellis Grey - but since it was twenty years ago, and Meredith's mother was dead, he really didn't care that much before this had come up. "He was your father. And he lives around here. You're telling me you hate him that much?"

"I don't hate him. And it's not like I hate Lexie either. It's just..." Meredith trailed off. "What does this matter to you? Frankly, this is none of your business."

"You're right, it isn't. And up until a few hours ago, I wouldn't have cared beyond a professional level, if that. But..." Now he trailed off. Jack realized he shouldn't have blamed Meredith for not wearing her heart on her sleeve. He sure as hell didn't. That had been his problem.

"You're not the only surgeon at this hospital whose parents kept secrets from them for decades." Jack took a deep breath. "I haven't told anyone else that yet, and I'm a lot closer to the people on Oceanic than I am to you. But I don't know anyone else who gets these kinds of bombs dropped on them on a regular basis."

It was a testament to how badly staggered he was that Jack was thinking of confiding in Meredith Grey, of all people. The moment he told her, it would be a matter of time before she went to Cristina Yang. Then she would go to her other intern friends, who would spread to the attendings, and within twelve hours at the most, the whole hospital would know. That would be bad enough, but there was a fair chance that a reporter would be eavesdropping, and very likely, his mother would find out that her husband had been unfaithful to her on TMZ. He'd be better off telling Hurley. At least, he would've known better than to tell strangers.

"Jack, I realize that this surgery was very difficult to go through. Maybe you should think about telling your friends that the operation was successful."

Of course. He knew that he should be grateful that Meredith was taking the decision out of his hands. She didn't want to deal with his shit. Why should he be that surprised? She had nearly as much excess baggage as he did, and he'd just spent the last few minutes reminding her of it. Yes, he'd been incredibly selfish, but just for a moment he wished that she could be a little less so. Anyway, there were people downstairs who would be sure to demonstrate far more compassion.

He'd been about to say something to Meredith - some kind of apology, though what would be particularly fitting, he had no idea - when suddenly, his pager started blaring. Jack had no idea why. Weber had given strict instructions that absolutely no one was to be on his service today, and if any of his friends had wanted to get in touch with him, they would've used their cells.

He saw Derek appear. Jack took this as a good sign; if something were wrong with Miss Littleton, he would've been in the thick of it. "Everything all right?" the neurosurgeon asked.

"No fucking clue," Jack mumbled. "I better find out what the hell's going on. Get back to me as soon as you know anything."

He ran down two floors, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Whatever patient it was, they were in long-term care, in which case they would need Derek's help, not his. He was beginning to think this was just the mistake of one of the newer interns, who had forgotten how to spell his name. But what the hell. Given what he was dealing with right now, the opportunity to yell at a subordinate - something he tended to avoid doing - seemed to be a welcome distraction.

It was only when he got down to the coma ward that he began to get even more confused. Bailey and Yang were present, and so was Lexie Grey. There was a certain logic to this, Yang had been in charge of Lexie before Jack had shown up at Seattle, and Miranda was chief resident, so clearly they were piling on her for some reason, and they wanted him to join the parade.

"You had no business doing this," Miranda was saying. "Do you realize how much of a panic you could've caused?"

"Dr. Bailey-"

"There are patients who actually _need_ surgeons. What are you going to tell their families if something went wrong?"

By now, he was nearly on top of the three of them, and it was clear that there was something going on far beyond the scope of the usual intern screw-up. Miranda looked genuinely furious, as opposed to the front she always put up, and Lexie looked like she was on the verge of tears. Jack had gotten to know Lexie very well, and knew that despite her greater humanity, at heart she was nearly as stoic as her half-sister was.

"I hope you didn't call me down just so I could see the three of you fight." Jack told them. "As you can see, I don't have time for this."

"She's your intern, which makes her your responsibility, " Cristina alone seemed calm as ever, but Jack thought that a bomb could go off in front of her, and she'd still seem bored. "And she said, she'd only explain to you why she turned off the machine, basically signaling a code to everybody on this floor."

If Cristina thought that this would explain things to him, Jack was even more baffled then before. "Lexie, I told you to handle my friends. I realize that's not the most thrilling task, but damn it, it was important to me."

"That's what I was trying to do." Lexie swallowed, and managed to regain her composure. "Handle your friends."

This just kept getting more and more unfathomable. "Dr. Grey, if you don't start explaining things to me, I can't help you."

"One of the doctors saw somebody on the floor," Lexie sounded even more uncertain than he'd ever heard her. "She was trying to sneak in to see Miss Littleton, and I read the report from the Marshal's service that they sent out."

Jack had only thought he had gone through the most potent of shocks today. This made what Claire's mother had said to be a walk in the park. "You're telling me that Kate is here?"

"I know she was your friend, Dr. Shephard," Lexie told her "but I didn't have a choice."

And suddenly, the old self-righteous Jack, the one that he had hoped that he'd left on the island was back. "Who told you about her?"

There was something in his tone that clearly was dangerous; even Cristina seemed a little concerned. "There are certain rules that have to be followed?

 _"Who told you?!'_

Now Lexie looked like she was on the verge of tears. "George."

There were a hundred reasons why this wasn't O'Malley's fault, not the least of which was he hadn't bothered to keep anyone in Seattle Grace involved with who Kate had meant to him. But Jack was beyond thinking clearly right now. So when he saw George walking up to him looking like he was scared shitless, he did something that was almost certainly the kind of thing that should've got him fired.

He walked right up to his intern and punched him in the face.

In front of two attendings.

Then, without looking around to see the looks of sheer horror that had appeared on everyone else, he ran off the floor.

Cristina recovered first, as was her fashion, and ran over to George to see if Jack had done any real damage - George had been hit before, but never with this degree of menace behind it.

Bailey recovered next. "Well, all three of you are now in a shitload of trouble, so maybe you can explain to me what the hell that was all about?"

"All I know for sure was gossip." Lexie told her.

"This hospital runs on gossip; I think we could use it as a renewable energy source. What did Dr. Shephard get so mad about?"

"The rumor was, before she became a fugitive, Kate Austen and Jack were having an affair." Lexie looked at George. "I'm guessing it was true."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Bailey," George looked around hesitantly. "Some of Austen's friends were going to try and aid and abet a fugitive. I wanted to have this happen with the least number of people getting hurt. Dr. Shephard's already had to deal with a lot today; I didn't think he needed to have any more of his friends possibly headed to prison."

"You still told Dr. Grey here to cause a code -"

"I made sure there were no emergent cases before she did it," George said patiently. "And Lawrence has been stable for the past two weeks. He was in no real danger. All Lexie did was make some noise. No one got hurt." He touched his eye where there was already some visible swelling. "Except me."

Bailey and Cristina considered this for a couple of moments. Everything George said was correct, and in truth, Jack had just violated more protocols than he had. There was going to have to be some disciplinary action handed down, but considering all the shit that had been falling the past few months, it was hard to figure out just how much blame they were going to have to land on the two of them.

Miranda was torn. As chief resident, it was her job to mete out an appropriate report before this went to Weber. On the other hand, she had a soft spot in her heart for both attending and intern, and she wasn't a hundred percent sure that, in this case, she could be impartial.

"Dr. Grey, Dr. O'Malley, for the moment the two of your are off the floor. Yang, check with the other Dr. Grey and the other Dr. Shepherd. Find out how long it'll be before Miss Littleton comes out of recovery."

"Since when did this become my problem?' That was Cristina. If she wasn't in an OR, she could give a damn about human fallout.

"We need somebody to handle this. This is what residents _deal_ with. Handle it." Miranda left the floor.

"Where are _you_ going?" Yang demanded.

"Someone has to tell Shephard's friends what happened. And I can't count on you to be a human being."


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

Ostensibly, Jack knew that what had happened to Kate was not his fault. The feeding frenzy over the Oceanics had been going on for months. If Kate had wanted to see him, he was a lot easier to find than some of the others. And he knew that, given her survival skills before she had gotten on the plane, that if she'd wanted to get in touch with him, she would've found a way. So the fact that she had chosen to come on what was probably the worst possible time for her to reach him was not his fault. Hell, seeing him was probably the last thing on her mind.

But old habits died hard. And now, on a day that had already had enough stressors to make dealing with John Locke and Ben Linus seem like a walk in the park, he was again reminded of their entire relationship on the island. On how many times he'd gone on long treks, instructing Kate not to come with him, only to have her end up following him anyway. Had it been some kind of self-righteous grudge against the fact that Kate had come to the island in handcuffs, and he was forever holding it against her? Some stupid kind of jealousy about the way she had bounced between him and Sawyer all the time they were on the island? Whatever it was, the fact was he'd been an asshole to her far more often then he'd be nice. Maybe that had been one of the reasons Kate had never reached out to him.

And now, she had stuck her head out in order to come here. And one of the interns he'd been the closest with had cut it off, almost certainly without knowing what he'd done. That didn't make Jack any less hostile towards him. Which meant he wasn't in a great mood when he saw James and Juliet hanging around the marshal's station.

"Christ, Doc, this is the last place you should be," James said the moment that he saw him.

"Did you know she was here?" Jack demanded.

James knew better than to dick him around. "She sent me a couple of text messages a couple hours ago. Said that she wanted to get into the hospital to see how Claire was holding up."

That's why she had come. To see the one member of the Oceanics she couldn't have visited unless she wanted to get on another plane. To see the child that she'd help deliver into the world. This stung a little, yet Jack knew that it was one of the more unselfish things she'd ever done. Still, once again, she'd chosen Sawyer over him. And it hurt.

"Kate's been in hiding for more than a year. You'd think she'd have been a little more sensible than this," Jack said slowly.

"She wanted to see Claire. This was her best chance," Juliet said.

"She couldn't have waited until the surgery was _over?"_ Jack pointed out. "By tonight, everyone would've been back at their hotels. The media circus would've died down a little by then." He looked at them. "This didn't occur to _either_ of you?"

The sheepish look on both James and Juliet's faces showed that, in fact, both had been so stunned by Kate's reappearance, that they had completely let logic go out the window. He didn't know who he was more disappointed by; James, who after all was something of a criminal himself, or Juliet, who had demonstrated time and again, that she was the more logical one of the group. Or maybe he was just upset by the plain truth that, if he'd known that Kate was in the hospital, he would probably have done the same thing they had.

"She came back, Doc. Hell, you know the kinda gal she is," James said slowly. "When she wants to help somebody, she runs right into the hornet's nest, and fuck the consequences."

There was little point in arguing it. That had been what she'd done on the island, and she'd done the same thing here. "Ate you guys going to be in trouble?" Jack asked.

"Depends how vindictive the marshal's plan to be," Juliet admitted. "We were trying to get a wanted fugitive into a hospital, after all. Kate is more than willing to fall on her sword, and say that she was responsible for everything. "

'She does that. A lot." Jack reminded them.

"My guess is, the cops got who they came for; they're not going to try to make this uglier than it has to be." James said, somewhat uncertainly. "They wanted Freckles, they got her. No need to turn this damn hospital into a holding cell."

Jack couldn't help but notice the brief look of pain that had crossed Juliet's face when James had used her old nickname. Even with his old love probably on her way to jail... well, she was human after all. "How'd the surgery go?" she asked.

"Miss Littleton's in recovery." Jack looked at his watch. Could it really have been less than an hour since they'd wheeled Claire's mother out of cryosurgery? The media was going to be descending even more vociferously than they had before this day had started, and he was willing to bet that none of their questions would be about medicine. "You two should probably get up to recovery. Make sure that Claire is doing okay."

Both of them looked at Jack. "Sure you want to talk with her, Doc?" James asked. "She's already done a much better job hurting herself than you could."

An unfair but admittedly pertinent comment. "I haven't seen her in a year," he reminded them. "God knows the next time I'll get a chance to see her again. I need to talk to her. "

"Why?"

"To find out why she didn't stay and fight. Why she did what she always does. Run away."

Sun knew that something was wrong. Claire was still in recovery, waiting for her mother to regain consciousness. But Jack hadn't come down to tell them if there had been any other develops since then. Instead, they had been visiting by one of the surgeons, Meredith Grey, who had given them details in the least personal way possible.

For the next thirty minutes, there had been no sign of Jack, but there had been a lot of other activity, usually such detailed English that Jin had needed to ask for translation on several occasion. There were a lot of other doctors around, but none of them were the same ones that had been dealing with them over the past several hours. Hurley seemed to take it as a sign that something had gone wrong with the surgery, and they weren't telling them. Sayid had told them not to worry, but then he had noticed that for various times, Juliet, Sawyer, and Desmond had all disappeared.

"I thought we had stopped the whole keeping things from each other when we left the freighter," Hurley finally said, after nearly forty minutes had gone by without anybody talking to them at all.

"I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that, brutha," Desmond finally reappeared, looking truly disheartened.

"Perhaps if you'd just tell us we'd be able to figure it out for ourselves," Sun finally said, a little exasperated herself.

"That's why I'm back, and I'm guessing Jack is going to be more than a little distracted for... quite some time." Desmond took a deep breath. "Kate's back."

Everyone's reaction was pretty much the same - Jin returned to his native Korean to deliver an obscenity that only Sun understood. (She would've been amused to know that Hurley had said the same word in Spanish). Then everybody began talking at once, until Desmond held up a hand.

"I realize everybody's concerned about her, but come on, don't tell me you're all shocked to know that Kate would do something like this."

"She's been on the run for nearly a year," Sayid told them. "The Kate I know would've shown a lot more sense than to do something this carelessly."

"She wasn't exactly careless." Desmond said slowly.

"Dude, where are Sawyer and Juliet?" Hurley asked. The light bulb then went on over all of their heads.

"Why didn't she come to any of us?" Sun asked slowly. "James could end up back in prison just for trying something like this."

Hurley, who'd been a little slow on the pickup before, answered this question before Desmond could. "Because Jack was too busy."

"And you?" Jin was following this conversation a lot better than he would've been in the past.

"They asked me how I got into the hospital without security noticing." Desmond told them, looking more than a little shamefaced. "I told them upfront it was a bad idea, and we went through with it anyway. I take no pleasure in being proved right."

Everybody considered the general awfulness of the situation that lay before them. Then once more, Hurley got right to the guts of their problem. "Someone has to tell Claire."

"I'm not sure that's the best idea," Sayid said.

"Dude, Kate came to see _her._ Probably Aaron too."

"Which is exactly the reason that we shouldn't tell her yet." Sayid reminded him. "Considering everything that Claire's been through in the last few days, do you really think she needs to know what happened to one of her closest friends?"

Hurley considered this for a few moments. "If it were me, I'd want to know" he finally said. "Besides, if we don't do anything, you know Jack's going to tell her, and _he's_ got enough on his mind."

They all considered the utter ugliness of this situation, somehow not surprised that their friend had managed to make a mess of what was already an ugly situation. Everyone figured that Hurley, who had always been something of an ambassador, on and off the island, was going to be the one to volunteer. Besides, he'd been close to Claire ever since Charlie had died. Which is why all of them were more than a little stunned to see Sun rising to her feet.

Only one seemed a little less surprised - her husband. "You sure this is the right thing to do?" he asked.

"Claire trusted me with Aaron every time she went somewhere," she reminded them all. "If she's going to hear some bad news, I think she'd rather hear it from me."

The rest of the group seemed a little surprised at this, but they knew very well that Sun was a lot stronger than she appeared to be. "When you see here, remind her that we're all here for her." Hurley said.

Sun actually managed to smile at this. "She knows that already."

Even though Jack had known, practically from the first time that he had met her, about Kate's fugitive status, it was something of a shock to see her in handcuffs.

What was even more shocking - and he wouldn't realize it until after the mess was over - was something that wasn't as obvious. As long as he had known her, Kate had always had a lot of fight in her expression. This was a woman who wouldn't take shit from anyone. He knew this because in their time on the island, he had given her a lot of it. But no matter what she had to deal with, whether it had been some monster destroying the island, or the Others telling her to stay still, Kate had always had a look of defiance in her eyes.

Until now. The Kate Austen that he saw before him looked beaten, and even later, he couldn't figure out why. She'd been dealing with far more messy circumstances long before she had come to the island. So the question was: why had being taken prisoner now defeated her?

Jack wouldn't be able to figure that part out for awhile. He had enough on his plate dealing with the groundswell of emotions he'd always dealt with when he saw Kate, and he hadn't seen her for nearly a year. He was a mess of anger, grief, and joy at seeing the woman who had stolen his heart quite some time ago. There were so many feelings that he had, in his typical fashion, managed to suppress over the past year, and now he had to deal with them all at once.

He looked at the two marshal's positioned on either side of her. "Could the two of you give us a moment?" he asked, hating the quiver that had entered his voice.

The marshals looked as rigid and unyielding as Edward Mars had. "Sir, this woman has been listed as one of the most wanted fugitives in the Bureau."

"I'm well aware of the crimes she's committed." No point telling them that he'd only learned the full extent of them _after_ they had been rescued. "She practically walked into your arms today just to see us. Even if she could escape, she has no intention of trying until she finished doing what she came here to do."

"Are you trying to convince us to stay here?" Neither marshal's mouth had moved much. Jack was tempted to think of them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

"I have no intention of helping her escape." He said it so sincerely that he almost believed it himself. "But she came a long way to get captured, and I think it would only be fair before you haul her off to Guantanamo that we get to have a single, private conversation."

Another long pause. Jack was beginning to wonder if these two policemen were actually human being or rather androids that had to be programmed how to respond. "Your friends already tried to break the law to get her inside."

"That was a mistake. Besides, I'm not them." Another big risk. These guys, if they had read Kate's file had to know what Jack meant to her. In fact, the last thing any of them wanted was the cops digging very closely into their recent past.

The two marshals conferred for more than a few moments. Jack couldn't quite tell what they were saying to each other, but he could bet it was nothing good. Finally, they turned back to him. "We'll be right outside the door." Tweedledee said

"And get that tape recorder out of here," Kate finally spoke for the first time.

"Miss Austen-"

"You know damn well this isn't my first rodeo," she said, with a trace of the old fire in her voice. "I have nothing to say to you without an attorney present, and probably not much then. Let me talk with my friend."

There was a long enough pause for Jack to think that maybe they were going to ignore her after all. Then, reluctantly, Tweedledee turned around and said: "Ten minutes. That's all you get."

There was a long pause and then the two of them finally walked out of the room. The moment they did, Kate slumped back into her chair, as if the act of merely being snippy to the marshals had drained her.

Jack considering remaining quiet, and letting Kate make the first move. Then he realized they didn't have enough time for lovers games. "I gotta know why, Kate. You're smarter than this."

"That's it? You're not even going to pretend you're glad to see me?"

That hurt. A lot. "I spent months getting over you. I moved to a different city, a different job to get over the pain. I had just gotten used to the idea that I would probably never see you again." Jack looked deep into her eyes. "And as much as it hurts, it would've been worth it, knowing that at least you were free."

Kate seemed a little better to hear this. Not much, but a little. "Until I texted Sawyer two hours ago, that was the first contact I've had with any of you for more than a year," she told him. "It wasn't just you I cut myself off from. All of them. All of my friends, I had to throw away to keep you safe."

Despite the utter and complete direness of this situation, an involuntary spasm that might have been mistaken for a laugh passed Jack's lips. "You finally got it." Kate looked utterly incredulous. "Why do you think I kept telling you over and over on the island that I didn't want you to come after me? I needed to keep you safe."

Kate actually managed a smile at this. "We really should've talked to each other more."

"Maybe that was part of the magic of the island. Kept us from talking about the important parts of our lives." Jack smiled a little. "I've actually gotten a lot better at that now."

"Sorry I missed that," she told him.

"So how about we start now," he told her. "I know what you did. Shit, the entire world now knows about the collective crimes of Katherine Anne Austen. But honestly, I'd rather have heard about them from you than John Walsh."

"You were the one who told me that I had a blank slate the third day on the island," she reminded him.

"And you know goddamn well that I never treated you like you actually had one," he countered. "That was unfair of me, and I realize that now. We could spend what time we have left on recriminations, but I don't think we should. So just answer my question. Why didn't you stand and fight?"

Kate considered this carefully. "My father was a monster. He beat my mother, he beat me, and he was a lousy drunk. When I killed him, I was trying to spare my mother years of pain with him. And the first thing she did when she learned about this was call the cops. The only excuse that she ever gave me the last time I spoke with her was that he was the man she loved, and I made her life worse. She was the one who pressed charges. She didn't even come to see me when we got rescued. I didn't stand and fight, Jack, because my mother wouldn't dare stand and fight for me."

Jack considered this carefully. "As you'll recall, from some of those long conversations we had on the way home, most of the people on our plane had shitty parents. I just recently learned that my father, who I would never have considered a saint before he died, had an affair. For years." He held up a hand. "Granted, your parents were probably shittier than all of ours put together, but still it's not like we couldn't relate. And we would've stood and fought for you. Hell, Sawyer and Juliet just proved that, if nothing else."

Kate actually straightened up a bit at this. "I'm not a good person."

"Yes, you are. You've just done some bad things. News flash, all of us have." Jack looked at her. "I'm not proud of everything I've done, but I'm not ashamed of it either. You just have to find a way to let go."

Kate fell back. "I'm on my way to prison, Jack. Probably for the rest of my life."

"Unless they've radically changed the way the justice system works since we were stranded, you have to go to trial first." Jack reminded her. "I realize you've been dodging the system for so long that you may have forgotten that, but if what I heard is true, you will be allowed to defend yourself."

Kate considered this. "What kind of defense could I possibly put up?"

"There's a roomful of millionaires down the hall who'd be more than willing to put up your bail, and get you the best legal team possible." Jack didn't bother to say that he would've been one of them, partly because he figured that Kate had to have realized that by now.

"I've escaped custody more times than I can count," she argued, a little less forcefully this time. "That has to count against me."

Jack actually managed to laugh at this. "You're a celebrity, Kate. Famous people get acquitted all the time of far more serious offenses."

Kate actually seemed to be listening to him. "They could drag this out forever."

"What _are_ you really afraid of?" Jack demanded. "Are you so afraid of having to stay in one place that you always have to keep running? Have you been on the run for so long that you actually like it?"

Kate looked a little appalled at the very suggestion. Then she seemed to actually be considering it for awhile. Jack didn't know that Sawyer, of all people, had raised the same idea just a week before they had finally been rescued.

All her time on the island she had spent doing her damnedest to make sure they got rescued. Never mind that the first thing that would happen when the rescue boats arrived would be to put her back in handcuffs; Kate had been the first one to volunteer every time they had to go on a mission. And when that had looked like that was going to happen when the law was preparing to do it, rather than stand with her friends, she had bolted. Only this time, it had been a hundred times more difficult and a thousand times more painful. Sun and Jin had their baby, and she'd never even seen her. Sayid and Desmond had been reunited with their long lost loves, and, given how closely Sawyer seemed to have been with Juliet when he'd seen her, he'd moved past her. She'd been running all this time, and her life had been standing still.

Jack was right. It was time to face everything.

"Will you stand by me?" Kate asked. "I know all of this will just throw another massive monkey wrench into your life again -"

Now Jack managed another, more genuine laugh at this. "You really think after everything we've been through that I wouldn't stay with you?" For the first time, he looked at her without judgment. "I love you, Kate. And as much as I may have tried to bury it, I never _stopped_ loving you."

And then, for the first time since he'd come into the room, he reached out and touched her. "We will get through this. All of us. Whatever it takes. We didn't go through everything we did on the island just to be stopped by something this.. this" He struggled for words. "simple."

"You call this 'simple'?"

"Well, compared to being chased through the jungle by a smoke monster, anything else would seem lightweight."

Now Kate was the one who managed the tearful laugh.

Their timing was impeccable; at that moment, Tweedledee and Tweedledum reentered the room. "All right, time to go, Miss Austen." Tweedledum told them

Jack got up and faced them. "Where are you going to be holding her?"

"That's not up to us." Tweedledee this time.

"Are you going to be charging Juliet and James?" Kate asked.

"That's not up to us, either."

"You know, considering all the time you've been chasing her, you don't seem to know an awful lot." Jack argued.

"Dr. Shephard, we allowed you time with Miss Austen as a courtesy. Frankly, we're still considering pressing charges against your friends." Tweedledee definitely appeared to be the more aggressive of the two of them.

"And you'd have a huge amount of trouble getting any of it to stand up in court." Jack argued. "I assume that after finding the woman that you've spent all this time chasing, you read Kate her rights. If you were going to do the same to my other friends..."

For the first time, both marshals looked a little concerned. The idea that there had been sloppiness of procedure on both sides clearly had never occurred to them. "We're taking our prisoner into custody . Once we're certain she isn't going to run away again, we'll allow her to contact you. Beyond that, she's not getting any more preferential treatment."

They lifted Kate to her feet. For the first time, Jack noticed that they had put her in leg irons as well. They _really_ didn't want her to make a break for it again.

Jack looked at her. "Don't worry. I will always be with you."

He followed her out the door and kept his eyes on her until they led her out of sight. Under other circumstances, he would've stayed with her until he could no longer follow her. But right now, he had other concerns on his mind.

Two of them walked right up to him. "How she's doing, Doc?" James asked.

"A lot better than you'd think," he told the man who had been his rival for Kate's affections for three months.

"She's not going to do anything reckless, is she?" When the others looked at her, Juliet shook her head. "Any other reckless thing?"

"You know how hard it is to talk Kate into doing anything," Jack pointed out. "But I think we'd better make sure of it. We're going to need to talk to Hurley in a little while. "

"Shouldn't we tell everybody?"

"Oh, we're going to tell everyone. But Hugo's most likely going to be the one who knows the best possible attorney." Jack said.

James looked a little nervous at this, but Juliet seemed a little more secure. "You're going to make sure that she gets out?"

"She's not going to have to run anymore."

It said something about the roller-coaster the last several hours that Claire's day had been that the news of Kate's reappearance and subsequent apprehension wasn't anywhere near the most shocking thing that had happened.

Oh, she was worried about Kate, make no mistake - with the exception of Charlie and Hurley, Kate had been the person on the island that Claire had been the closest to. And to learn that she had most likely been caught because she had come to see her was more guilt that she really wanted to deal with today. But right now, she was more concerned about when her mother was going to come out of the anesthesia than anything else. (She refused to believe that Mum wasn't going to wake up after everything that they had been through over the years. Medical prognosis from one of the best neurosurgeons in the world be damned.)

Sun wasn't sure whether or not to be relieved that Claire was taking this so well or concerned that her friend wasn't going to erupt into tears the second she left. Either way, given the intensity of everything that had happened here, she was not going to leave her friend until somebody in authority got back.

"Did anyone tell you how long it would be until your mother woke up?" she asked.

"Dr. Grey told me that, even in the best case, she'll be out for another nine to ten hours." Claire told her. "Comes with being under the anesthesia." She looked around. "I really hate hospitals."

"I'd think having to give birth on a tropical island had given you a certain appreciation of them."

This actually managed to get a faint smile out of Claire - it had been one of the first jokes they had shared as soon as they had been rescued. The smile faded. "I'm sorry I lied to you when you asked about my parents," she told her.

"We lied about a lot of things when we were on the island," Sun admitted.

Claire blushed a little at this - Sun had told some real whoppers, and had lived through a lot more. "That's not what I meant to bring up." There was no real easy way to say this. "Apparently, telling giant lies is something that runs in my family, and I didn't even know about the biggest one until a few hours ago."

Sun had expected something like this had happened. Jack had been distracted after Claire's mother had gone into surgery, and considering that he had a lot of trouble holding information in, she had a feeling that it was something very personal, and possibly very terrible. It couldn't be much worse than some of the secrets that she'd kept or Sawyer or Kate had, but they had learned enough about each other to know that it might be something pretty awful.

"You're dealing with a lot of stress right now," she told her friend. "Now really isn't the time for you to be dealing with bigger problems."

"She's right." Both of them looked up at Jack, who had somehow managed to enter the room without either of them noticing. He looked a bit better than before the operation, which was odd, considering that he'd just been briefly reunited with Kate.

"How is she?" Claire asked. Even though her mother was in a hospital bed, there was no question what _she_ was being talked about.

"Considering she just got taken back into police custody, I think she's doing a lot better than we'd think." Jack told them. "We're going to need to get her the best legal team possible."

"What about Sawyer and Juliet?" Sun asked "Are they going to get into any trouble?"

"Considering that one of my interns managed to run a fair amount of interference, they'll probably get by with slaps on the wrist." Jack looked troubled for the first time. "Which is far less punishment than I gave him." He shook his head, and turned to Sun. "Even given the amount of pull I have here, they're not going to let more than one or two of you up at a time, at least not until Miss Littleton wakes up. You might want to go back to everybody, and tell them they should probably come in shifts for the next few hours."

Sun considered this for a couple of more moments, then told Jack and Claire that she'd be back in a couple of minutes. "Is there anything I should tell them about her condition?"

"Not right now." Jack hesitated. "However, you can tell them one more thing. No matter what the outcome of this surgery, Claire's family will be a bit bigger regardless."

Sun wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but judging from the grin that had crossed Claire's face, for once Jack had completely said the right thing.

George had come to respect Jack Shephard a great deal over the past several months, more than almost any of the other doctors who was going to practice at the hospital. He realized that what he had done could be seen as much as a betrayal than trying to help him. Did it justify getting assaulted by him? Probably not. Then again, considering what Jack had gone through over the last several hours, he had been under a huge amount of stress. For that matter, what he had done was a lot more likely to be viewed poorly than anything Jack had done.

So, when Jack Shephard approached him a few hours later, he wasn't entirely sure whether it was for an apology or because he wanted to slug him again. So, he decided to be proactive. "Dr. Shephard, I realize what I did was over the line."

"People in this hospital are a lot of things, I didn't expect them to be this forgiving." Jack was actually smiling a little, which considering everything that had happened was remarkable.

"I thought I was sparing you a fair amount of pain." George told him. "Considering how nice you'd been to me, I figured I should return the favor. I didn't know about your history with Miss Austen."

"How could you?" Jack asked. "It's not like I went out of my way to be open to anybody about what happened on the island. Here's something no one else as this hospital knows."

"I already know a lot about you, sir," George pointed out.

"Even when I was on the island I didn't tell a lot about my past," Jack told him. "Truth of the matter is, I've been more honest about everything that happened in my life to the people at Seattle Grace in the past year then I was to anybody on the island the three months we were stranded."

There was a story there. Hell, there were probably _years_ worth of stories there. George decided to focus on the one that was the most pertinent. "Lexie told me that you were in a relationship with Miss Austen."

"She's on her way back to prison because of you; I think that you can call her Kate." His wince must have been visible. "That came out wrong. Truth is, regardless of what you did, there's a good chance she'd be on her way back to jail anyway. Kate is many things, but she's never been subtle."

George was a little surprised. "You're not pissed at me, Dr. Shephard?"

"How I could be angry at you? You did the best thing that you possibly could with the information you had." Jack told him. "The information that could've helped you wasn't in that file, and I was in no condition to tell you about it. The only reason I hit you was because it's really hard to punch yourself in the face."

"You should work the ER more. You'd be surprised at what you end up seeing." They exactly exchanged grins this time. "How upset is the Chief going to be?"

"I'll explain it to him first. I imagine considering the extenuating circumstances, he'll understand."

"Maybe." George said. "Though he will be angry at the thought that one of his best surgeons could've wrecked his hands in a fit of irrational anger/"

"Not that that same surgeon was in trouble based on who he slept with." Jack held up his hand. "Right, I forgot what hospital I was working at."

This time, they both managed to laugh. "Actually, there's one more thing I want to show you." Jack told George.

They walked down the hall until they were outside Carole Littleton's room. Suddenly, George thought he could see why Dr. Shephard was in such a good mood.

Several of the passengers from Oceanic were in the room. And in the hospital bed, Miss Littleton was sitting up. "She regained consciousness ten minutes ago," Jack told them. "Thought you might want to share in the good news."

George looked a little strange. "But I didn't even scrub in on the surgery."

"Believe me, Dr. O'Malley, this wouldn't be possible without you."


	10. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Despite everything that had happened the day of Carole's surgery, the next few days had been among the best ones that Jack had gone through for quite some time.

Admittedly, there had been some painful moments. Glazebrook, the DA who apparently seemed determined to make her career off Kate Austen the same way that Marshal Edward Mars had been quick to have her indicted less than two days after she was brought back into custody. Jack would've thought the last year would've been long enough for her to put together a case against her, but the ADA seemed determined to drag it out even longer.

That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Hugo had been more than willing to make sure that Kate had the best attorney available, even willing to put down a half-million dollar retainer. The attorney, a man known for dealing with far more extreme criminal cases, was named Alan Shore. With a relative bluntness that Hurley preferred, he had told Kate not to fight being tried in LA, where far more guilty defendants had been acquitted, nor to fight being denied bail. "You've already proven that you're the definition of a flight risk," he told her. "Best way you can prove you're ready to fight this is to stand still. Voir dire is going to take awhile anyway. The prosecution's going to have a fair amount of trouble of finding twelve impartial jurors anyway."

Despite his arguments that the case was winnable, he told Kate flatly that she might have to end up taking a plea. "Glazebrook is going to try and bury you with the number of charges," Shore had told her. "The evidence is anywhere from two to five years old, most of the witnesses are going to be hard to find, and you never confessed to anything. Her case is almost entirely circumstantial, and most prosecutors with a circumstantial case plead out. " Shore had then looked at her. "Honestly, if you'd just stayed still after she announced she was planning to file, you might not be in jail right now."

Kate had managed to keep her poker face at this. "You've read my file," she told him. "You know what kind of bastard my father was."

"I do indeed, Miss Austen," Shore sounded sympathetic. "And that's definitely going to be an option when it comes to our defense. But Glazebrook is going to argue that you ran because you were guilty. And that you kept running all the way to Australia. In the narrow glance of a DA, flight always means guilt. There are no extenuating circumstances. Which is why your best option is to stay put. Your friends may be willing to pay any reasonable and even some unreasonable sum to keep you out of jail. But the best thing for your case is to stay where you are. Show you want your day in court. And get this horrible mess behind you."

Jack had never tried to make this argument before Kate had gone on the run last year, mainly because he was too emotional about the subject. However, he decided at this point, recriminations weren't going to make things any better, and he was done trying to blame Kate for everything. She went back to LA, with promises from everybody that they would do everything in their power to make sure that she didn't stay in jail any longer than she had to.

On a somewhat brighter note, Jack told the others that Claire was his half-sister. All of them had been very supportive, and had been more than willing to stand by him when he told his mother three days later. His mother had taken it fairly well, but Margo Shephard had always been a resilient woman. (Jack had never told his mother that his grandfather had always objected to his marriage; his father had managed to go to his grave without telling her, and he intended to do the same.) No doubt some of this had been better because she actually had a grandchild now, and she had been gratified by Claire's news that, at least for the immediate future, she and her mother would be staying in America. Part of this was a necessity brought on by her mother's need to recuperate, but most of it had to do with getting to be with her friends and new family.

And things had been looking better for Miss Littleton. Her recovery had been fairly remarkable, even though it was probably going to be a month before she would be a hundred percent. Even more remarkably, no one seemed to care that much that Jack was related to the star patient's daughter. In all honesty, he wasn't that surprised. Considering how self-involved most of the residents were, they'd barely even been that excited to know that their hospital had been the location for the end of a massive manhunt. The fact that their resident Oceanic survivor was related to another one seemed to go through them just like sands through an hourglass.

Admittedly, Derek had been more concerned about how this would affect the well-being of his patient, and had been a little more than amazed that this had been another link between him and the man almost shared his last name. But he treated Miss Littleton the same way he did before he learned that - like any other patient. Jack couldn't help but think that this was another thing that his father had tried to teach him about bedside manner. However, the only doctors who seemed to be willing to be understanding were George, Lexie Grey and Izzie Stevens, who by this point was beginning to consider spinal surgery as a specialty.

Things had been going so well, in fact, that Jack had expected another shoe to drop. When it did, he was a little surprised where it came from, and how. Hurley called the group of them together (sans Desmond, for some reason) and told them one of his other projects for the last few months.

"You hired a PI to find Walt and Mike nearly a year ago, and he's only come with information now?" Sawyer asked.

"I didn't have a lot of information to go on," Hurley had told them. "Most of what Walt told me was about his mom, and Michael didn't know him til they got on the plane. I'm lucky they found him at all." He picked up a file. "He hasn't exactly had an easy ride ever since he got back to civilization. Three months ago, he checked into Bellevue under the name Isaac Philips. Apparently, he had a massive panic attack in the middle of school." Hurley sounded immensely sympathetic. "The doctors haven't been able to find anything wrong with him, but he refuses to leave. The only visitor he has is his grandmother."

"Considering the trauma he went through, I'm amazed he held it together as long as he did," Sayid told him. "Have you made any effort to contact him?"

"That's kind of why we're talking now," Hurley was clearly nervous; being in any kind of position of leadership always made him jumpy. "With, like, maybe the exception of Locke, I was closest to him of like anybody on the island. That's the main reason I wanted to find him. Considering where he is right now, I figure I can talk to him a lot easier, maybe even get him out of that place. But when I do that..."

They all got it about the same time, but Sun got it to words first. "Then the world's going to wonder where he's been, and why we've been saying he and his father are dead."

This had been one of the things that had been hanging over them since the group had returned to civilization. Everybody knew that Michael and Walt could've blown the whistle on the great lie that the survivors of Oceanic 815 had been telling. None of them had thought they would do it, given the horrible circumstances of Michael's betrayal and escape. But as the weeks and months had gone by, it had seemed less and less likely for it to be an issue. Except for Hurley, who had more of a reason than any of them not to let this go.

"Did you find Michael?" None of them were surprised that Jin had raised the issue; the two of them had become friends before Michael had done what he'd done.

"That took a bit longer, but yes. " Hugo told them. "I was shocked considering that everything he did was to save Walt, but Michael apparently left him with his grandmother a few weeks after they got back to the states. He's been a mess ever since then. He hasn't been able to hold down a job, he drinks too much." He took a deep breath. "And according to my guy, he's tried to kill himself at least three times in the last year."

It had been a long time since Jack had felt anything other than contempt for Michael. Now, considering the mess he had been the first few months after getting back, he thought he could actually manage a level of sympathy. He could tell that most of the others did as well, especially Jin and Sawyer. However, one of them seemed to be struggling with it a bit more, and considering what was involved, it was surprising.

"Let's say that you know where to find him," Claire told him. "What exactly do we do next?"

"I've been wondering about that ever since I sent my guy to find him," Hugo looked unusually solemn. "And I need to know whether we should do anything, or just let..."

There was a long silence, though no one could tell it was because of what Hugo seemed to be implying or that he was considering it in the first place. No one on the entire island had ever had a problem with Hurley, and he didn't have a problem with anybody. But Michael had shot Libby in cold blood, and just stayed around as she died to make sure she didn't rat him out. Then he had sold them all down the river to get off the island with his son.

"I've known some pretty bad guys in my time, Hoss," Sawyer said slowly. "But even I don't think they'd have the balls to just let this kind of thing happen."

"Well, what are we supposed to do?" Hurley sounded a little short. "He killed two people. And there is no way any law enforcement agency in the world can punish him for it. The only ones who can do it are us." Then he looked at Sayid.

"I can understand why you'd want him to suffer," Sayid said slowly. "What Michael did was contemptible. But we all did things on the island that we've tried to put behind us. He deserves to be punished but we tried having our own code, and most of the time, it was a disaster."

"If he'd killed two people anywhere else-"

"No one's saying that he shouldn't have to pay," Sun told them, "but if we let this sort of thing happen, without even trying to understand his side of the story, we're no better than the ones who forced him to do this."

Suddenly Hurley looked at Juliet hard. "That's kind of why I asked her to be here, I figured she might have an idea as to why he did what he did."

And for the first time since Jack had gotten to know Juliet, she looked ashamed. Small wonder. In all the time that they had known each other, Jack had never pushed Juliet to find out what she had done when she had been with the Others. He knew that she had done some horrible things - she admitted as much about a week before they had left - but he had never gone after her the way the rest of the survivors had wanted. Now, it was looking like she was beginning to wish that she had.

Sawyer seemed to be getting that as well. Not for the first time, he was beginning to wonder what the two of them had talked about when they had begun the relationship - Juliet admitted that the first time they had met, she had held a gun on them. "Think it's time you spilled some of the secrets you've been keeping, Blondie," he said gently.

"The night that you launched your raft off the island," Juliet said slowly. "Ben told us that some of you were attempting to leave. He got Tom to take the boat and rendezvous with you when you were on your closest approach to Hydra Island."

"How did you know that we were leaving in the first place?" Sayid demanded. "Ethan was killed before we started real work on the raft."

Now Juliet was beginning to look embarrassed. "During the time I was on the island," she said, "Ben seemed to be the official leader of the Others, but he always claiming to be taking his marching orders from someone named Jacob. Someone who only he talked to, who nobody else ever saw, and who he claimed made all the rules."

"And you really believed that horseshit?" Jack asked incredulously.

"I never did," Juliet insisted. "But the rest of them, they all took it like it was gospel. Trust me when I tell you that most of Ben's people liked him even less than you guys did. The only reason no one bothered to take him down before was because he was Jacob's mouthpiece."

"Then how did you really find out what we were doing?" Now Sayid was beginning to sound just a bit like his old self.

"The Dharma Initiative had surveillance stations all over the islands. My guess is Ben was monitoring you. He waited until you were about the leave, and then gave the coordinates to Tom."

"That explains how you found him. Why did you take Walt?" Sun asked.

It was odd seeing the usually self-assured Juliet seem so unsettled. "We'd gotten reports from Ethan before - he was killed that there was something unusual about Walt. Something that was critical to the island." She looked at Hurley. "Normally, I'd have been inclined to dismiss this as more of Ben's bullshit, but the three weeks we had him, there was a lot of strange shit going on."

"Stranger than getting attacked by a pillar of smoke?" Sawyer wasn't nearly as sarcastic as he usually was.

Strangely enough, Juliet didn't answer. "The week before she was... killed," Sayid said slowly. "Shannon said that she had seen Walt several times, soaking wet, and speaking gibberish. I thought she was being hysterical. Then, right before she died, I saw Walt too. Because of everything that happened during the next weeks, I basically pushed it aside as a hallucination. Now... I'm not sure what to think honestly."

Hurley seemed a lot less angry than he had earlier. "Are you saying, like, Walt teleported himself?" he asked Juliet.

"I don't know. But a couple of the people Ben trusted thought he might have that capability." Juliet said. "Whatever it was he has, Ben's people were not prepared for it. A lot of us became very afraid. Then Ben went on his trip to see you." She looked at Jack. "Before he left, he told Danny Pickett to use the computer from the Pearl to trick Michael into thinking that Walt was communicating with him. The plan was to try and use Michael to try and explain what Walt was." She shook her head. "Apparently, all the information Ben had on him didn't include the fact that Michael hadn't had any contact with his son since a few months after he was born."

"Why did Ben let himself be captured?" Sayid demanded.

"He wanted to find Jack's weakness and exploit it so he could save his own skin." Now Juliet was speaking with certainty. "I don't know why he went through all that bullshit as Henry Gale - he never explained half the shit he did - but before he did he left clear instructions that under no circumstances was anybody to allow any deals to be made. No one leaves the island. Gospel according to Benjamin Linus."

"But they did agree to negotiate," Claire said.

'Things got notably worse after Ben left, and even he admitted that we got more than we bargained for with Walt," Juliet paused. "Mind you, most of this is secondhand information. I didn't want anything to do with Ben by this point. The only time I even spoke to Michael was the night before we sent him back to you people with his mission. Even then I wasn't sure I wanted him to be rescued."

"So you didn't tell them to save Ben by any means necessary?" Hurley asked. For all the revelations that they were getting, this seemed to be the most important point.

Juliet shook her head. 'We didn't even know if he was capable of shooting anyone, much less murdering two people in cold blood," she told them. "And honestly, considering how capable some of you were of violence, I thought that if it came down to it, Michael was far more likely to end up dead."

Now more all of them seemed more than a little ashamed. They'd all been responsible, with the exception of Claire, for taking a life when they'd been on the island. Could this whole mess have been resolved if they'd been far more willing to just talk to each other? Even given the space of a year, Jack wasn't sure he knew or even if he wanted to know the answer.

Sayid, who'd had far longer to reflect on his sins then the rest of them, finally looked at Hurley. "I told Jack after Michael returned that a father might do anything to save his son. But even then, I believed that he would have to be punished at some point. I just thought that we'd be the ones to do it."

"Well, we're here, dude," Hurley said. "But here's the thing. Much as I want Michael to pay, I don't want Walt to have to suffer any more. He's already gone through so much, and he isn't even fourteen yet. That's what I keep coming back to. He's already lost his mom; I don't want him to have to be an orphan."

Sawyer, perhaps not surprisingly, spoke up next. "Based on what you're telling us, kids already halfway there. Way I see it, kid loses any chance of staying whole if he learns his Dad's gone."

Jin and Sun, who each in their own way had been close to Michael on the island, and who were now parents, both felt pretty much the same. And Claire who had just realized in the past few days the importance of family seemed more incline to agree. In addition, she had another perspective. "There's a fairly good possibility that Kate's going to spend some time in prison, and if we didn't know her, we might be more inclined to lock her up. Shouldn't we be willing to extend the same benefit of the doubt to Michael?"

They then all looked at Sayid, who had, in his former life, been trusted in a similar position regarding justice. Furthermore, in his way, he was guilty of far more sins than Michael had ever committed. "When we tried to impose due process on the island, more and more often, we turned into a mob. Admittedly, in a way, we're all Michael's peers. I realize that Walt is suffering, and it would hurt if he were to lose his father. But is it any better for him to go on, like the rest of us, knowing how fatally flawed his father is, and watching the world do nothing about it?"

"World can't do anything about it, Sayid; kinda think that's the point we've been driving at," Sawyer pointed out. "Besides, from what Kong's been telling us, he's been doing a pretty good job of punishing himself. Don't you think he's suffered enough?"

"'Some people are just born to suffer," Jack spoke up for the first time in awhile, not even fully aware he was saying it.

They all looked at him strangely, Sawyer with more than a twinge. For the first time in a long while, Jack remembered what he had told him the day he had gotten on the raft about meeting Christian. Had his father mentioned his famous saying when he had gone on the bender that had ultimately landed him in the morgue? Given why he had probably been in Sydney in the first place, he was not inclined to rule it out.

"Something to share with the rest of the class?" Juliet had a strange look on her face as well. Just how detailed _had_ his file been?

"All of us suffered a lot before we came to the island," he reminded them. "Michael did more than his fair share when we got there, and it sounds like coming home hasn't done much to change things. I think that a time comes when you just have to say enough is enough. We've been trying to help each other ever since we got back to civilization. I don't see why he shouldn't be any different."

Jack knew, even though he had ceded his role of leadership when they had been rescued, and despite the fact that the majority of the survivors seemed to want to save Michael regardless, that, just like on the island, everyone seemed to be looking to him. He didn't know whether trying to save Michael's soul was the right thing to do, but they'd all been granted a new life since coming back, why not him?

"But if we're going to do this, we should prioritize." he said slowly. "And right now, I think that means we have to help Walt."

There seemed to be a more general agreement to this than there had been to the idea of helping Michael. Even if Walt really was psychic, and given the evidence of Juliet and Sayid, who Jack would've figured would be the more rational people he knew, there was a real possibility that he was, the fact remained that he was still a thirteen-year old boy who had gone through a lot of trauma, and really needed their help.

"And how exactly do we do that?" Juliet asked.

"Let me deal with that," Hurley told him. "My guy found out where he is,. And I think know the best way to get him out."

"Sure you're comfortable flying again, Hugo?" Sawyer asked. "I gotta tell ya, just going cross country wasn't exactly a picnic."

"I figured some of you would come with me." Hurley said slowly.

They thought about this for several minutes. For obvious reasons, Claire and Jack couldn't be the ones to go. Juliet hadn't known Walt that well, and given their prior association, she didn't want to think what would happen if he saw her. Sayid considered going, but he'd never had much of a relationship with Walt on the island, and he wasn't certain if he was comfortable seeing Michael yet. Both Sun and Jin wanted to go, but because neither of them was entirely comfortable leaving Ji Yeon alone at the moment, they agreed that Jin would take the trip. By now, Jin had learned enough English that he figured he could get by without his wife having to translate for him.

Finally after a few more moments, Sawyer decided that would go as well. "Might as well get the band back together," he said, with some of his old swagger.

There was a certain amount of logic to this - Sawyer and Jin had gone along with Michael and Walt on their expedition to leave the island, and he had gotten a lot closer to Hurley during the last month or so there - but Juliet seemed a little puzzled. "You sure that you want to do this, James?" she asked.

"I ain't going on this trek to get some kind of revenge," he told them. "Hell, if you want you can come along, if you feel its a risk."

"I don't have a personal stake in this," Juliet reminded him.

"Didn't say you had one. Thought maybe you'd want to see Radio City." he told her with a grin. "'Sides, no one said you had to be there when we got to him."

"All right," Juliet told him. "But how exactly do you plan to get him to leave without getting his grandmother's permission?"

"That's the tricky part, " Hurley admitted. "Basically, it depends on how much Walt has told her. "

"Can't have told her much," Sawyer said. "Otherwise, she'd have started screaming bloody murder when we returned to civilization. "

"She's got to have some idea," Jack pointed out. "Even if her son and grandson didn't tell her anything, she knew what flight they were on. She knew we were lying the first press conference we ever gave."

"I'm a little surprised nobody's tried to track her down since then," Sayid thought out loud. He shook his head. "Leaving that aside, how exactly will you convince her?"

"By telling her the truth, or at least some of it. " Hurley pointed out. Everybody shot him the same look. "Dude, family can be more understanding then you think. I told my Ma two weeks after I got home. "

Jack realized he shouldn't have been that surprised. Hurley had always been the most honest of them, and the few times he had tried to keep a secret, he had been terrible at it. And hadn't they given him his blessing on the freighter?

"And she believed you?" Claire asked.

"She said she didn't understand me, but that she believed me," Hurley admitted. "I gotta tell you, having her support has been a lot of help. I mean, don't get me wrong, you guys are awesome, but it's been a big boost."

They all looked a little sheepish at this. Apparently, with the exception of Sayid telling Nadia, none of them had bothered to share with anyone outside the circle. Jack had to wonder whether things might have been easier had he told his own mother about some of the things that had happened on the island. Well, there was still time.

"So let's say you tell her, and you fudge over some of the more weird details, which I figured you'd probably do anyway," Sawyer said, "how does that convince her to let us help her grandson?"

"For starters, I'm going to pay off the debt I owe him," Hurley said. Everybody looked a little blank. "Walt won about a hundred thousand dollars off me playing backgammon. Always promised him I'd pay up."

"You got schooled by a twelve-year old, Hugo?" Sawyer said slyly. "Clearly, I chose the wrong game to play you at."

"It's your own fault for playing against a telepath," Juliet added.

Hurley considered this for a few moments. "He _did_ always seem to get the score he needed to beat me when..." He shook his head. "Money's not the point, or at least not all of it. You gotta figure the medical bills for being in a place like Bellevue have gotta be pretty high by now. I'm going to tell her the truth, and offer to help her family. Which brings us to the next step. " He looked at Jack. "I know that this place is like top-notch when it comes to handling surgery, but what's it like when it comes to handling psychiatric patients?"

Jack had not really considered this section of the hospital before. This wasn't unique among his fellow surgeons - most of the residents were amazed that places outside the surgical ward _existed_ \- but it did bring about a couple of problems. "We're fairly well endorsed by some of the psych centers in the country," he said slowly. "But if you're honestly asking me to transfer Walt here, there are going to be a lot of questions."

"Yes, like how long it will be until someone from the press figures out who Walt is," Sayid reminded them.

"Someone's going to figure it out eventually." Hurley countered. "At least this way, we get a chance to, you know, control the story. But right now, that's actually lower on my concerns than making sure we can do something to help Walt. And he'll stand much a better chance of getting better if he has the support of his friends."

Jack thought about this. "You should probably remember that I used a lot of my chits with Weber in getting Miss Littleton having surgery here. And as an added bonus, his hospital was the site of a major arrest."

"You're honestly telling me that Seattle Grace hasn't handled a lot of bad publicity before?" Juliet countered.

It was a valid argument, considering that what had happened to Denny Duquette almost a year ago should have ended with Seattle Grace being shut down by the organ donor watchlist, and had half the residents suspended, if not in prison. In this case, the publicity would have more to do with the patient than it did with the hospital, but he didn't know that Dr. Weber would see it that way. "This may take a little more effort on my part," he argued. "I'll have to find a way to do it a lot more subtly than we did her."

"That's what we do when we have to handle Walt," Sun said slowly. "But it still doesn't answer what happens to Michael. And we don't know what he'll do when he finds out his son is gone again.."

Everybody remained silent for a couple of moments. For all the discussion and debate, no one was sure how they were going to persuade the man who had fucked them over.

Fittingly, it was Hurley who had the final word on the subject. "We're going to save him from himself," he said with a seriousness that almost no one had known he was capable of. "And once we have, we're going to find a way for him to face justice."


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

 **New York City**

 **One Week Later**

Considering all the effort Hurley had done to make sure they had gotten here, Sawyer was a little surprised at how nervous the big guy seemed to be now that they were actually here. Or maybe it wasn't much of a surprise. The big guy was a gentle soul who didn't like confrontations. Now he was about to have a big one.

"You're sure you want to be the guy who does this?" Sawyer asked. "Me and Jin could probably get in with a lot less effort. Lot less likely we'll be recognized than you will."

Hurley actually seemed to consider this for a few moments before shaking his head. "Thanks, dude. I'm good." he finally said.

"Maybe we should come in with you," Juliet put forth. "Strength in numbers."

"Thought about that," Hurley told them. "One member of the Oceanics showing up in this hospital _might_ get noticed. Four of us - press would be on us faster than gulls on fish tacos by the time we got out. We want to control this, at least as long as we can."

He took a deep breath. "Stay patient, guys. Can't say how he'll react to seeing me again." He got out of the rental car, and walked towards the front door, glad that none of them had tried to make fun of how nervous he was at being in a mental hospital again.

"He's been her for weeks, and he still hasn't been willing to tell any of our doctors anything," Nurse O'Connor told him as she walked him to Walt's room. "Frankly, we wouldn't know that anything's wrong with him, if it weren't for the fact a lot of strange things have happened over the last couple of weeks."

"Anything in particular?" Hurley tried to sound casual, as if he wasn't more than a little terrified about what might be waiting for him.

"He's very particular about being touched," the nurse told him. "That's not unusual about many of our patients, but a couple of our younger residents who gave him his medicine don't want to go near his room now. And every so often, we've received word that the bodies of dead birds keep appearing inside the building."

"You don't think that's a little, you know, strange?"

The nurse shrugged - not an encouraging sign. "It's an old building. We've had a lot of wildlife get in on occasionally. It's weird they always seem to be near Isaac's room."

Hurley suddenly wished that Juliet hadn't told him what had happened outside Room 23 on Hydra Island. It just fit a little too well with what was happening now. "Aside from his grandmother, has he had any other visitors recently?"

Nurse O'Connor shook her head. "He said that his mother's dead, and that he doesn't care where his father is. His words, not mine."

Despite how he felt about Michael, Hurley couldn't help but wince at the last remark. Walt had more than a few reasons to hate his father, but to virtually disown him? That was cold, even for the survivors of Oceanic. "You didn't answer my question."

"There was one man. Tall, African-American. Claimed he was one of Isaac's guardians, but the young man told me not to let this guy anyone near him. He never came back. Said his name was Avedon or Abbott something like that."

This came as an even larger shock. Had Michael tried to visit his son under an assumed name. That might explain why Walt had been so quick to tell him to get the hell out. But Michael had never been that ashamed of his son to deny who he was. Did that mean that someone else had come in looking for him? A reporter? Hell, had an Other somehow tracked him down?

"Here we are," the nurse told him.

"Did you tell him who I was?" he asked.

"He said he didn't have a problem." That actually brought up another question that Hurley had been loathe to ask himself. Had Walt known he was going to be here _before_ he came here?

The nurse opened the door. And there he was. He was a little taller than he had been on the island, and his hair was cut a lot shorter than it had been, but Walt looked almost the same as he did a year ago. Except the eyes. He looked a lot sadder than he had when Hurley had last seen him. A lot more lonely.

"Hey dude," Hurley said awkwardly.

"Hey Hurley," Walt's voice seemed to be a lot sadder than it had before. And there was a total lack of surprise in his voice.

No sense messing around. "You don't seem, like, surprised I'm here."

"I had a dream about you a couple days ago," the young boy said. "You were in a hospital waiting room, and you were afraid everybody knew your secrets."

Once again, he was reminded how confident he had seemed the first few weeks that he had been in on the island. How he seemed to know just about everything that they were all trying to keep secret. Well, they were well past keeping them now. "I'm sorry I didn't come out to see you sooner," Hurley said apologetically. "There's been a lot of stuff going on the last few months, but I never forgot about you. I've spent months trying to track you down."

That got Walt's attention for the first time. "You were the one who sent that man?"

"Which one?"

"About a month ago, the nurse told me that a man named Matthew Abaddon came to see me. He told the nurse that he'd been sent by a powerful man to help me."

That got Hurley's attention in all the wrong way. He definitely didn't know a man named Abaddon, but he knew of a couple of powerful men who might have an interest in anyone who came back from the island. "Why didn't you let him in?" he asked carefully.'

"It's hard to explain," Now Walt seemed a little shaky. "I could tell, even from where he was standing outside the door, that there was something _wrong_ about him. Like there was something that was inside him that he was missing."

Yeah, that wasn't creepy at all. "I didn't ever send anyone to see you," he assured the young boy. "I had made up my mind that whatever happened, I would be the one who talked to you. Face to face."

For the first time since he had showed up, Walt gave a slight smile. "Ever since you and the other people came back to civilizations, I was wondering if you would ever try to find me."

Now Hurley was the one who had to frown a little. "Of course, dude. You were my friend. The only reason it took so long for me to get here was because you didn't exactly leave a forwarding address when you left."

The moment he finished saying that, he knew that it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. Walt might not have known what exactly his dad had done in order to get them off the island, but it would've taken a much younger and far less intuitive child to know that it hadn't involved some sort of betrayal. "My father told me what he did. That's why I haven't seen or heard from him in nearly six months."

Hurley hadn't needed Walt to tell him that, or to confirm that might have been the key element in pushing Michael to attempt to kill himself. But that was the last thing the kid needed to hear right now. "You haven't even told your grandma yet, have you?" he asked.

"My father didn't say a word." Walt hesitated. "He told Grandma she shouldn't tell him or anyone else that we were back. I thought she'd start asking me when you guys made your big return to civilization, but right then, she was more focused on be trying to get into school. Considering what Grandma had to deal with, she's done the best she could."

Hurley had never thought he would ask this question, but he figured he owed to him. "How much of what brought you here is because of.." He trailed off. "What you have."

Now Walt looked a little reserved. "What are you talking about?"

"You know that Juliet came back with us."

Walt had a blank look on his face. "Who?"

"It's a long story, and we can go into the details later, but for awhile, she was one of them." Now, for the first time since he'd come back, Walt looked a little scared. "I know what you're thinking, and it took me a long time to trust her, too. But we probably wouldn't have been able to get off the island without her help."

Walt considered this for a moment. "Did she have anything to do with being taken?"

"Only in the sense that she was one of them. She never really fit in with them, but some of them trusted her." Hurley realized something. "Way to get me off topic, dude. You were the one I was talking about."

Walt looked a little more like the boy he was. "I didn't want to talk about it. I still haven't told my dad about it. The only one who seemed to know about it was..." Now he seemed hesitant. "Mr. Locke."

That was a little bit of a stunner, raising all sorts of feelings in Hurley. He had never gotten along with John Locke - and given what he had been doing the weeks before they had been rescued, he wasn't sure he ever would've been - but he couldn't deny that Locke had been closer to him that just about anybody on the island. Had he known Walt's secret somehow? He had always thought the island was a special place, and he'd always treated Walt like he was an equal rather than a child.

But even if he'd known all that, Locke had never been the type to treat people particularly well. After Walt had been taken, he had spent all the time in the Swan pushing that button. He hadn't done so much as lift a finger to help them try and rescue him. Maybe if he hadn't been so obsessed with the hatch, he would've been able to help them, and Ana Lucia and Libby would still be alive.

He shook his head. None of this was important now. He had come on a mission, and he was going to do it.

"I don't really care if you're, you know, special or not," Hurley said honestly. "What I do know is that you were my friend on the island, and I want to be one again. Which is why we're here."

For the first time since he'd entered the room, Walt looked hopeful. "How many of you came?"

"Jin and Sawyer are here. So is Juliet, but she's more than willing to stay out of this is you want." Hurley explained. "The rest of us are in Seattle. You saw the news the last couple weeks?"

Walt nodded. "They finally arrested Kate again, didn't they?"

Hurley's face fell a little. "We're doing our best to make sure she doesn't stay there long, but it may be awhile." He tried to be more cheerful. "But everybody else is doing pretty well. Jin and Sun had a daughter. Sayid got married. Claire's mother came out of a coma. And Jack - he smiles a lot more these days. Things are a lot better now. And - we want you to be better, too."

Walt looked at him with his young-old eyes. "You know, I was the one who burned the first raft my father built."

The remark was so out of left field Hurley took several seconds to recover from it. "Why?"

"I spent my whole life moving around. I liked being on the island. I liked staying in the same place."

Hurley considered this. "So why'd you leave on the second raft?"

"The day before we launched, I had one of my feelings that something really terrible was going to happen. I didn't know what it was, only that it had something to do with the hatch. When I saw that, I got off the island as fast as I possibly could."

"Can't say your instincts were wrong." Hurley considered this. "Then again..."

"A lot of bad stuff happened after they took me. It's been bad ever since. For the longest time, all I wanted to do was go back." Hurley could now see that despite having spent less time on the island then the rest of the survivors, Walt was just as haunted, if not more so. "But there's no going back. That's part of the reason I committed myself. To make sure there was no chance I could."

"I don't think you could anyway," Hurley said. "But really, why would you want to? I'm glad that I met all of you, I really am, but half the time I was on that island, I was always afraid." It was the truth, he realized. "I'm not afraid any more. I think it's because I have all of you. And that's why I want to help."

"You're here to save me?"

"I wouldn't put it like that," Hurley told him. "But I know what it's like to be in one of these places. And I know from past experience how much they suck."

Walt looked at him. "The nightmares won't stop. I've been here for three months, and the nightmares won't stop."

"They will eventually. And even if they don't, its easier to talk about them with friends than with doctors." This part Hurley believed sincerely.

Walt looked like he wanted to believe him. "How would I leave?"

"Didn't you commit yourself voluntarily?" Hurley asked.

"Yeah, but they won't just let me out now."

"They will if your grandma agrees to sign you out."

"And how can I let her do that?"

"That's going to be the toughest part," Hurley took a deep breath. "You have to tell her the truth."

Walt considered this for a long couple of minutes. "Did you tell your parents?"

"I did." Hurley told him. "Wasn't easy. But they believe me and they support me. Your grandmother will do both."

Walt looked at him. "Will you be there?"

"Of course. Like I said, that's why I came."

SEATTLE GRACE

Jack had been avoiding psychiatrists like the plague for as long as he could remember. He knew that he wasn't alone in this - every surgeon and resident in Seattle Grace thought that psych was crap - but he had more reason to avoid them most. Admittedly, he had more people to talk to than everybody else, but he knew that everybody in his field considered it a sign of weakness to even talk about seeing one.

Nevertheless, he now had no choice in the matter. If Walt was going to move out here - and even given what Hurley had promised, he still thought that was a very big 'if' - he needed to talk to someone in psych.'

Perhaps not surprisingly, given everything that she had been through, Izzie Stevens had guided him to the shrink who she thought would probably be the most likely to be of assistance.

"Dr Skoda?" Jack asked, after knocking on the man's door.

"Yes. Oh, Dr. Shephard, the hospital's new media darling."

"I don't ask for attention, and I do my damnedest to avoid it if I can."

"I'm sorry. I've never been particularly good at being friendly."

"That's okay. Until fairly recently, neither was I."

Skoda looked a little surprised at that. "So, I'm guessing you're here because you need a favor."

"'I was going to say I needed your help, but that's as good a way to put it as any."

Now Skoda's face was genuinely amazed. "I'm sorry, it's just I've been at this hospital for five years, and no surgeon comes to psych unless they're court mandated."

"That's really a shame." Jack said honestly. "Half the staff here could benefit from a lot of analysis. I probably could do with some." Understatement of the year.

"I'm guessing you didn't come to schedule a session though."

"It's more for a consult than anything else," Jack admitted. "A friend of mine from the plane is in New York seeing someone who needs professional help."

He gave Skoda the details, but fudged Walt's identity as much as he could, as well as the exact nature of the problems he was facing.

"So this is a major case of PTSD?"

"That's a fairly accurate description." _Another understatement._ "His mother passed away about two years ago, so there's little hope for help from that direction. I'd try and pass on more medical details, but for what I can tell they traveled internationally a lot. Records are probably all over the world."

"Why do you want to transfer him here?"

"Hurley, Mr. Reyes, is a good friend, and he and Walt were fairly close." No need to tell him where.. yet. "And as anyone can see just my looking at the news, Hurley's very good to his friends. " Time to let this go a little further. "Hurley spent some time in a mental institution himself, and as good a place as Bellevue is, he always thinks that there's a better place for them."

"And this place is this hospital." Jack didn't blame Skoda for thinking this way.

"This place is with his friends. And if we have to transfer him to Seattle so that they can be together, Hurley's willing to do it." This part, at least was true.

"You have a lot more compassion than a lot of the people in this hospital." Skoda told him.

"Not a lot of surgeons willing to go out on a limb for their friends?"

"Not a lot of them have friends. They might go so far as to call them colleagues. And some of them might be willing to sleep with each other. But actual friends? There aren't a lot of them in this hospital, much less outside it."

Jack knew that from past experience, surgeons could be intensely lonely people. His father was probably the worst possible example that a person could use, but outside of the hospital, he hadn't had a lot of friends. He would've been inclined to argue, but he'd had, if anything, fewer friends. Jack had a lot of trouble just filling out his wedding party. It was somewhat telling that he'd had to crash on an island in the middle of the Pacific to finally get a group of really good friends. However, he didn't particularly want to recommend to people like Cristina and Meredith that the only way they were going to actually expand their narrow circle of friends was to get on an airplane and pray for turbulence. And he had no intention of spreading that particular tidbit to another relative stranger.

"Well, I have to give the credit to Hurley," he said instead. "No matter where the man is, he never has an enemy in the world. It was true before the plane crash, it was true afterwards."

"So I've gathered." Skoda actually seemed a little embarrassed. "I saw him on television, when he won the lottery three years ago. He seemed like one of the least ego-driven person I've seen, and that's saying something considering where he's from. If he's your main point of reference for this, I'm willing to give his friend the benefit of the doubt."

"Thanks," Jack told him sincerely.

"When will he be arriving?"

"My guess is two or three days at the most," Jack bit his tongue. "There's something else they're going to have to handle. Something that's going to involve something far more complicated."

For all his talk about wanting to deal with Michael, Hurley hadn't been able to see the man in person yet. James figured that he had made some kind of promise to Walt that he wasn't going to do anything to punish him. Then again, considering everything that Michael had done to save his son, having him virtually disown him was probably a worse punishment than anything the Others could've done to him.

Nevertheless, they had to deal with him somehow. So while Hurley and Juliet were talking with Mrs. Dawson about how to transfer Walt out of the hospital, he had given him the information that the private investigator had managed to find of Michael's last location. Somehow, James wasn't that surprised that he was staying within walking distance of a bar. Considering everything that he'd been through, he was a little surprised that Michael wasn't a full-blown alcoholic by now. Or maybe he was. A year and a half could do a lot of things to destroy a man.

"You sure you want to be here for this, Jin?" James asked again. "I know you and Mike were friends, but that was a long time ago. Lot of water under the bridge now."

Jin considered this for a moment. "I'm a father now," he told James. "Before the island, I didn't understand what a father would do protect his child. I think I do now." He looked at James. "Maybe some day you will too."

Had Hugo ratted him out to the others about Clementine? No. Jin would've been more direct about it. Then again, he had always been good at keeping a poker face. James might have asked him directly about it, but just then he saw Michael come out of the bar.

Granted it had been more than eighteen months since he had last laid eyes on him, but James would've had some trouble recognizing Michael anyway. He looked a lot older than a year and a half should have inflicted in the course of a normal man's life. The fringe of a beard that he had managed to maintain even on the island was longer and more unkempt, and there were flecks of gray in it. His hair was a lot longer and uncombed. His eyes were bloodshot, and from the looks of him, he was already well into the bag. His clothes were even messier. He bore the look of a man that even Christian Shephard would've never gotten into a drinking contest with. He looked exactly like Hurley had described - a man who was only a few feet away from dying.

Jin looked equally shocked by what he was seeing. Nevertheless, he recovered a lot quicker than James had. By the time Michael had wandered just a few feet down the street, he had gotten out of the car, and was walking towards him.

Michael stopped dead in his tracks for several seconds. He blinked several times, clearly unsure of what he was seeing. Then he did something that not even James had expected that he would do upon seeing the man he had built a raft with.

He started running away.

James had time to wonder if Michael had been so out of things since he had returned to civilization that he somehow thought Jin was dead, or that he had been drinking so much recently that he had thought the DTs were somehow causing him to hallucinate his former friends. Or maybe he thought that the island had somehow followed him all the way back to New York.

Then Jin started running after Mike, and he started to worry. The last thing that they needed to do right now was draw attention to themselves.

Reluctantly, James got out of the car, and started chasing after his friend. "Mike! Wait!" he shouted.

But Michael kept running. He didn't seem to care where he was going, or even if he drew a crowd. Then again, this was New York. Maybe no one would notice.

Considering how terrible he looked, Michael was in pretty good shape. He managed to lead Jin and James for nearly four blocks without apparently breaking a sweat. For a moment, James actually thought they might lose him.

Then Michael did something very strange. He ran into an alley. Neither Jin nor James knew the city that well, so he figured that maybe he was going to stand and fight.

Then James got around the corner, and saw something not even he would've expected. Jin was standing about ten feet away from Michael. There was a small revolver on the ground. Since neither of them had been carrying, it had to be his. And Michael was pointing at it.

"Go ahead," he told Jin. "Pick it up. I know you know how to use one."

Jin looked utterly flummoxed, and for once, James was betting that it wasn't because he didn't understand what Michael was saying.

"Michael?" In his shock, Jin seemed to be reverting back to the man he was on the island.

"Please, Jin." For the first time, he could tell that there were tears running down Michael's cheeks. And James, who had spent his entire adult life on the other side of the law, realized what was going on.

And clearly so did Jin. "No. I won't."

The desperation coming off the African-American would have been obvious to a complete stranger. He turned his gaze towards him. "Then you. Come on. You've been wanting to do this ever since I betrayed you guys. You knew how to do it. Please, Sawyer."

For the first time in a long life, James really, truly hated the sound of the man whose name he'd inherited. Anthony Cooper would've had no problem doing this. Hell, if what he'd said had been true, he'd pushed his own son out an eight-story window. But the Sawyer who could've done what Michael wanted had died on the island. And maybe it wasn't til just now that he realized that this was a good thing.

He turned to Michael, and picked up the gun. Even as he did, he saw something that sickened him: the hope that had appeared in Mike's eyes. The hope that died when he threw the gun in a dumpster. "Sorry, Hoss. I've seen far too many people die. You ain't gonna be another."

Michael looked utterly lost. For a few horrible seconds, James thought that man was going to go dumpster diving, and finish what he'd been trying to do ever since he got back to New York. Instead, he collapsed on the ground, full out weeping.

"It's all gone to hell. I've thrown everything away. I don't deserve to live." That seemed all he had left in him now.

James didn't know what to say. A small - very small -part of him thought that if this what Michael really thought, maybe he'd be doing him a favor. Then he thought back to the days when they had discovered the tail section survivors, and he'd seemed almost certain to die from an infection. Admittedly, his memories of the event were very hazy, but he did have a memory of telling Mike to leave him behind, when it seemed he couldn't go any further. Instead, the man had helped build him a stretcher, and they had carried him. Even though he had been half crazy about losing his son, Michael had refused to leave Sawyer behind.

Now, Michael was infected, only there was no medicine in the world that could cure him. Now it was his chance to return the favor. Too bad he wasn't sure he had the medicine that could do it.

Then Jin knelt down by him. "You haven't lost everything. Walt is still here."

"He doesn't want anything to do with me. I - I ruined his life."

"You did what you thought was right." Jin looked at him. "A father will do anything to protect his child."

Even though he was only a father technically, James was starting to think Jin was righter than he knew.

"I killed two innocent people. I killed Libby." Michael was still shaking. "I have to deal with this every day, and I can't carry it."

Unfortunately, this was something the old Sawyer had been an expert on, not that long ago. Possibly Jin was too, given their last stand with the Others. But this time, he thought he could make things a little better.

"I killed three people, too. And I didn't have anywhere near as good a reason as you did."

"There were other ways I could've gotten him out of the hatch!"

"You'd been carrying the world on your shoulders for three weeks," James pointed out. "You were desperate. Desperate men do desperate things. Trust me on this."

For the first time, Michael looked up. "You're not here for revenge."

"Shit, Hoss, I got over that a long time ago. Trust me when I tell you, revenge doesn't give you anything."

Michael stopped crying. "Then why are you here?"

James remembered the first time Michael had asked him that question, right before the Others had intercepted the raft. He hadn't time to answer it then. This time he did, even though the circumstances were completely different. 'Cause I want to help a friend in need. And cause I know how shitty things can get when a son grows up without his parents." He put his hand on Mike's shoulder - the first time he'd touched him before they had gone on that futile raid on the Others. "You did everything you could to protect your kid. You shouldn't have to pay for it."

Jin looked at Michael. "It's not too late, Michael. You have work to do."

Michael thought this over. "Your English is a lot better now."

"I've had lots of time to practice." Jin took a deep breath. "Everybody's been worried about you. You deserve to be happy. So does Walt."

"I pretty much fucked that up. I don't even know where he is anymore."

This wasn't going to be easy. "He's been in a mental hospital for the last few months.," James said slowly. Before Michael could start crying again, he interrupted: "This isn't all your fault. Others did a hell of a number on his head. Hell, given everything that happened, all of us could've used some time getting looked at."

Michael looked up. "You said, he's been in a hospital."

"Hurley's talking with your mother. She's going to check him out in the next few days." Jin told him.

"You mean I can see him?" Hope had entered Michael's voice for the first time in the conversation.

"That's going to be up to him," James told him. "But before we go any further, there's a couple of things you're going to have to understand."

Michael looked at them for a few moments. "I'm not going to fuck things up for you guys."

"If you'd wanted to do that, you'd have done it a year ago." Jin pointed out.

"We're kind of amazed you've managed to stay under the radar as long as you have." James added. "But we weren't lying about being here to help. That meant both of you."

"How're you going to do that?"

They laid out the idea that Hurley and the rest had come up with back in Seattle. It didn't take as long as they thought it would. When they were finished, they expected Michael to object. Surprisingly, he only had one. "Won't this rain a lot more shit on you guys?"

"We had to deal with enough issues when Freckles decided to resurface," James pointed out. "By comparison, you and Walt stick to your story, there won't be any big headaches.

This was the first real lie James had told Michael. Bur even he wasn't completely sure what Hurley had planned as soon as they found a way to help Walt.

"All I ever wanted to do was protect my son," he reminded them. "No matter what. I can't defend my actions any other way."

"You're not going to court Michael," Jin told him. "We're not letting anyone go to jail. Not Kate. Not you."

That much was true. They'd been judged, time and again, on the island. Compared to that, anything else would be a cakewalk.

But then, they both knew that if the island had been a test, Michael might well have failed already. Maybe Mike knew that, too.


	12. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Compared to the shitstorm that had come when Kate had been arrested two weeks earlier, the arrival of Walt Lloyd in Seattle went a lot more smoothly. Part of it had to with the fact that after Carole Littleton had survived her surgery and Kate had been arraigned in LA, the majority of the media had either relocated to California to try and follow a showier story or had left the Oceanics for bigger fish. For those who were left, very few would have known who Walt was, and even fewer would've been able to link him with the nearly teenage boy who showed up in Seattle Grace under the name Peter Michaels.

Jack, at least, was grateful for this relief. Walt had been through even more shit than most of the survivors. The last thing any of them was another media circus until they could figure out a way to help him and his father. For now, no one seemed to notice, and most of the staff at Seattle Grace took him at his word that Peter Michaels was just an acquaintance of Hurley's from before the crash.

The harder part was figuring out what they were going to do about Michael. Apparently, when he had told his mother what had actually happened to them, and by extension the rest of the Oceanics, on the island (fudging over Michael's darkest hours for the moment), her main concern had been trying to figure out why nobody had come to talk to them before now.

"I spent the better part of a year trying to track them down, Mrs. Dawson," Hurley had reminded her. "It wasn't like I had an address for them. Not a lot of paper on the island."

Mrs. Dawson had acknowledged as much, and had admitted that this explained at least some of why her grandson had been having such a hard time readjusting. "But how exactly do you plan to help him now? How does moving him across the country make his life better?"

This time Sawyer had done much of the talking. "A lot of bad shit happened when were stranded, and what helped us get through it was being around each other. I was never much of a people person before, but being around my friends has kinda helped me deal with a lot of shit in my life. And I was a lot more messed up than either your son or your grandson were."

"We're not saying we're going to take them out of your life, Mrs. Dawson," Hurley had assured her. "In fact, if you want to come with us to Seattle, we'd be more than willing to buy another ticket. It has nothing to do with money. We just want to help our friends."

Mrs. Dawson considered this, then looked at her son, who'd been remarkably quiet. "When Susan took Walt away, I know how hard it was for you to give him up. I know that you didn't want to give up without a fight, and I know that you've been suffering for it ever since. I could never understand why you lied to me for all that time. Now that I know the truth, I almost wish you'd kept lying."

"It was an ugly time, Ma," Michael apparently didn't trust himself to say anything else.

"When I heard your plane disappeared, I thought I had lost you forever. Ever since you came back, I've been feeling like I keep losing you. Both of you." Mrs. Dawson shook her head. "I know you keep saying this is for the best, but I feel like I'm about to lose you again."

Hurley and Sawyer had reassured Mrs. Dawson that this wasn't going to happen. Even so, Jack had wished he had been a part of the conversation. Enough time had gone by that he wasn't sure whether he wanted to see Michael punished for what he had done, and he was pretty sure most of the rest felt the same way. It was going to depend quite a bit on what Walt wanted, and honestly, he wasn't sure how the pre-teen was dealing with everything right now.

. Which had been part of the reason that he was waiting outside the young man's room right now. Skoda had just finished his session with him, and he wanted to see if he could talk to him.

To be perfectly honest, he wasn't a hundred percent sure what he was going to say to Walt. He had never had much of a relationship with him on the island, and except for a few fleeting glances, he'd barely spoken with him since the rest of them had brought him back. He wasn't qualified to discuss things with an ordinary child, much less one that Juliet had said was psychic. All he knew for sure was that he'd be better off just being honest with him.

As he entered the room, Walt fixed him with a stare that he had sometimes met people with when he was on the island. Jack hoped like hell he wasn't going to do anything to piss him off - according to Juliet, that was when the strange things were most likely to happen.

"I guess the absolutely worst thing that I could ask you right now is how are you doing," Jack began.

"I've been better," Walt admitted. "But to tell you the truth, Jack, I've also been a lot worse."

"Yeah," Jack thought for a moment. "I'm sorry that we arranged this. For the last couple of years, you must be really sick of going from one small room to another. "

"It's not that bad." Walt told him. "At least more people have been coming to visit me then in Bellevue. Claire even brought Aaron a few hours ago. "

Jack hadn't decided to tell him yet about his and Claire's relationship. Given what he'd been told, Walt had a clearest idea about it when he made physical contact with somebody. He decided just to wait and see what would happen. "Has your father been in to see you yet?"

The hopeful expression on Walt's face died. "What are you going to do to my dad?" he demanded.

That's what he picked up when he touched somebody, Jack thought. Not even Hurley would dare to blab about what they were thinking about yet. Well, they weren't going to get anywhere by lying now. "None of us have decided yet," he admitted. "Most of us don't want to do anything that would end up hurting you any more than we have to. But Hurley, you know, he has a reason for seeing things differently."

The moment he said this, he wished he could have taken it back. He didn't know if anybody had told or even if they should have told Walt what exactly his father had done on the island to get him free. Whatever the case, it should never have come from him.

And then Walt shocked him. "He already told me." he said slowly. "On our way back to civilization. That's why I didn't want to see him for so long."

 _Shit._ That explained a lot. Especially why Walt had been so reluctant to even talk about his father until recently. "I'm sorry," came out of Jack's mouth.

"For what? None of this is your fault."

"Not for that. For the island. Everybody kept looking to me to try and make all the decisions," Jack told him. "And all that time you were gone, I couldn't come up with a real concrete idea to save you from them. If I'd done anything sensibly, maybe your dad wouldn't have gotten so desperate."

"The Others manipulated him, too. Besides, he could've come to you instead of taking it all on himself." Walt seemed a little more relaxed then before.

"I think that everybody did that a bit too much on the island. It may have been the one thing we all had common besides being stuck together."

They actually managed to share a smile at this. "I went to Bellevue, because I was messed up, and because there was no one I could talk to about this." Now Walt frowned a little. "I'm actually a little surprised it took you guys so long to reach out."

"We've all been dealing with our own shit," Jack looked at him. "Hopefully, that's over now, and we can concentrate on helping each other. That includes you and your father."

"You're not going to punish him?" Walt asked so casually Jack actually needed a few moments to realize that he'd heard right.

The question had come so easily Jack figured he was entitled to a direct answer. "There's some debate about that. On the one hand, whatever reason, Michael did kill two people. No law on this earth can effectively punish him for that, not without causing a shitload of trouble. On the other, their families already know that they're dead. Your father's done a very good job of punishing himself the last year and a half There comes a point where anything else just seems like revenge. Eye for an eye... that's pretty much how the Others did things."

Walt looked at him. "You still haven't answered my question."

"That's basically because we haven't answered it yet." Jack told him. "What I can tell you is, as much as we tried to do things on the island, we never had a democracy. And as leadership goes, I did a pretty crappy job of it. Besides, it's not like we ever did a particularly good job of coming up with a realistic way of punishing people. I can promise you, whatever we decide, we won't keep you in the dark." He looked at Walt "It's not like we could really hide it from you if you wanted to know."

"I don't know if this counts for anything," Walt said slowly. "But I've had a lot of time to think over the past year. I finally managed to understand what he went through. And I think I can finally forgive him."

Walt had much more reason to bear his father animosity than just about anybody else from the crash. This did carry a lot of weight, at least with Jack. The question was, would it mean the same thing to everybody else who came back?

It had taken a fair amount of debate to figure out what to do next. The idea of having a trial, which Hurley had been pushing for, didn't make much sense, considering most of the people who would've been witnesses would have to be on the jury. Nor would it have been easy for anybody to be on that jury to be truly impartial, considering what Michael had done had been the equivalent of a betrayal to the entire group.

Finally, Sayid had hit upon the idea that might be the most rational: the format would be the equivalent of a military tribunal. Three people who seemed the most capable of being impartial would sit on it: Sayid, who had been responsible for more deaths than he had wanted to give credit for being; Juliet, who had been an Other, and who had known what they were capable of, and Claire, who was a parent, and who had the most interaction with the Others before they had taken Walt. (Under other circumstances, they would've asked Kate to be the potential swing vote, but her incarceration made this impossible.)

The rest of them would serve as witnesses either for or against Michael. Hurley, who had the most reason to be angry with him, was very reluctant to try and play prosecutor, considering his total legal experience came from watching reruns of Law and Order on USA. But his relationship with everybody on the island, meant that mostly he could be impartial. Jack said that he would be more than willing to defend Michael, considering his previous position.

Michael had been surprisingly willing to go along with all this, considering everything that he had been through the last year. His major question had been something of the sticking point. "What are you going to do if you find me guilty?"

"There's going to have to be some kind of punishment," Jack admitted. "Nothing violent, and nothing fatal. What we'd have in mind is something that's fair. I don't honestly know what could be worse than anything we've gone through ever since the plane crash, but for once I'm going to leave it in the hands of someone who isn't me."

They decided to go to one of the hotel rooms that they had been staying in ever since they had all gotten to Seattle. Hurley had given one of the bellhops a fairly considerable tip to let them know if there was any sign of the media showing up.

"You're going to get your day in court," he told Michael, "and right now the only public opinion that matters is ours." Then negating the sternness, "God, I do sound a little like Sam Waterston."

The proceeding ( even given everything that had happened, Jack couldn't bring himself to call it a trial) began the next day. Considering how fun-loving and carefree Hurley had been on the island, it was hard to imagine just how solemn he was in his opening statement. He made it very clear that he had always trusted Michael, that he had supported him and his son throughout their time on the island, and that as a reward for their trust, he had killed two innocent people (he'd had to swallow when he mentioned Libby) and then betrayed them to save his son. Even though they'd all been rescued in the end, they still needed to serve some kind of justice. He admitted that Michael had suffered, but that didn't count towards what he had done to other people. That was what the tribunal had to consider when it came time to follow their oaths.

Jack had been many things in his life, and he knew that he'd failed at a lot of them, but he'd never been much of a legal scholar. Nevertheless, he decided the best way to argue Michael's case was to try it from his point of view.

"When we ended up on the island, my first instinct was to try and fix everything. From that moment on, everybody looked on me to be everything - the doctor, the leader, the one who made all the important decisions. And whatever major decision I made for the group, it was always questioned and debated by everybody else. I had a hard job. Arguably the most difficult one on the island. And despite the fact that we were saved in the end, everyone knows I handled everything badly."

He looked at his client. "All that said, I would never for a minute have considered trading positions with Michael. Michael hadn't seen his son almost since he was born. And less than a week after he flew down to Sydney to meet him again, he was a plane crash that could've killed them both. In the early days, he did everything he could to protect his son. When it became clear that rescue wasn't coming, I told everybody that we had to dig in. He was the one who made the first, and then the second major effort to rescue us. He put his and Walt's life on the line to save us. And as a reward for that effort, his son was abducted right from under his nose, and he nearly drowned, barely surviving a shark attack and imprisonment. He then spent nearly a week trying to get back to us. Then the Others manipulated him in order to take him prisoner because they wanted more information on his son. And after being held hostage for nearly a week, he was told that the only way to save Walt was to follow a series of orders." He managed to look right at Juliet when he said those last words. She never blinked.

"No one is saying that Michael's actions weren't wrong. He himself doesn't believe they were right. What I'm asking of this tribunal is whether or not his actions were justifiable. And since we all spent are time on the island with these same people, we know that they were capable of things far worse than what Michael did. And let's be honest. None of us who were on the island can truly say that our hands are completely clean. Did Michael do the ethical thing? Probably not. But considering what his situation was, could any of us have done the same thing?"

It was a potent argument. And he might be able to see Sayid going along with it. He wasn't, however, sure that the women would've thought otherwise. He wondered if it would've made more sense to have Desmond on the tribunal instead of Claire - since he'd had almost no interaction with the Others and had never met Michael at all, he probably would've been the closest to being impartial. But Penny was eight months pregnant, and he had no intention of leaving his wives side for that. It would depend on what kind of case Hurley was going to present.

Since trying to present witnesses to be completely in the traditional courtroom setting would've been difficult, considering everybody had almost been witness to the same events, Sayid and the others decided to try a more impartial system. Each of the survivors would be questioned by Hurley and Jack in no particular order. There would be one exception - Walt, who Jack intended to call for the defense. The judges would then be free to ask any questions they thought about something that they didn't think was clear. After all of them had been questioned, each of them would make a closing argument, and the tribunal would then deliberate. Hurley had been a little puzzled by this procedure, but figured in the end it was closer to fair. He knew he wasn't going to be able to testify, and his testimony would probably be the most emotional and damning. But he was determined to try and see this through the right way. "It's what Libby would've wanted."

The first person to speak was Sawyer. It was hard to tell which side would be more effective. Hurley focused the majority of his questions on what had happened after Michael had been returned to the survivors. Sawyer had been a pretty devastating witness, explaining how Michael had managed to manipulate them into going across the island only with the people the Others had wanted, how they had learned that Michael had betrayed them after killing two of them, and finding out the depths of his deception when he had led them to another station before taking Walt and the boat.

Jack had then handled the questioning. "How did you get along with Michael before the boat was built?" was his first cross.

"Not that well. But then, my charming personality probably didn't help."

"The night the Others destroyed the raft and took Walt, how did Michael handle it?"

Now Sawyer seemed a little more sympathetic. "He kept screaming the kid's name out. Even when it was clear there was no way anyone could hear him."

"After the raft was destroyed, and you encountered the tail section survivors, you began to fall ill. An infection in your shoulder."

"There a question?"

"How did Michael treat you?"

"He made sure we walked slow enough so that I could keep up. And when things got worse, he helped build a stretcher so that everybody could carry me."

"And its a good thing he did. You were pretty close to dead by the time you got back to our camp. Now, when Michael attacked me and Locke, and when we started chasing after him, you joined the search party. Even though, you were just a few days recovered."

"It didn't have to do with Mike." It was the first time that Sawyer had admitted he gone after them with vengeance in his heart.

"But that was the reason you gave for coming. And I seriously doubt you would've come if I'd just asked. One last thing, after all that time you spent building the raft, did you get the impression that Michael would do anything to protect his son?"

"That's the one thing that I am sure he would do."

The next witness was Jin. Sun had offered to translate any questions that he didn't understand, but everyone knew that by this point, Jin was fluent enough. He told them that he had gotten into a fight with Michael in the first week that they were on the island over a misunderstanding, and that they had been very hostile for much of the next few weeks, until he learned his wife's secret, and had started to build the second boat to get off the island. He told him how they had started to form a friendship until the boat had been blown up, and that bond had gotten stronger over the days ahead. He told them that he had taken the sailboat around the island to try and protect Michael, only to learn later that he had escaped without even saying goodbye.

Jack had kept his questions short and to the point. "When you were on the island, you didn't know any English at all?"

"That's right."

"You and Sun pretty much kept to yourself the first month we were on there. Then you learned Sun's secrets, and that was a major betrayal. Correct?"

"Like, how is this relevant?" Hurley objected.

"I have a point. And I think given that I've never done this before I should be granted a little leeway."

"A little quicker, Jack."

"For the next couple of weeks, you and Michael began to form a relationship, even though neither one of you could understand the other. And you kept this friendship up through the raft's launching, the encounter with the Others and being abducted and imprisoned by the tail section. In fact, when Michael ran off to try and find Walt, you and Mr. Eko ran after him in order to try and protect him." Jack hesitated. "It seems that this was a fairly close friendship for both of you."

"Michael was one of my closest friends." Nobody could've missed the sorrow or the fact that Jin had used the past tense in that sentence.

"When Michael ran off, you wanted to join the search party, but Sun talked you out of it."

Jin considered this for a moment. "She was right to make me stay."

"You didn't learn about what Michael had done until about a week after it had happened. " Jack paused. "Knowing everything that you do now, does that change your feelings at all about what Michael did?"

"He should've been able to talk to us about it. We would've understood."

"One last thing. In the time since this trial, you became a father. Can you honestly say that in a similar situation, you wouldn't do anything to protect Ji Yeon?"

"Perhaps." Jin paused. "But I would've talked to her mother first."

That certainly didn't help.

Both of them questioned Sun, but neither Hurley nor Jack was able to get much of merit from it. Sun had revealed her secret to Michael before anybody else, and it was clear that she had trusted him, but it was hard to tell if that had made the sense of betrayal worse. It was clear that what he had done had hurt, but it hadn't been any more direct that some of the other actions that the rest of the group had taken against her, particularly considering some of the things that Sawyer had done.

A few other survivors had given their impressions, and Kate had made a statement that she had asked to be read into the record, but Jack just couldn't tell if either side had an advantage. It seemed like it was going to come down to whatever Walt ended up saying.

Jack began. "Walt, before the plane crash, did you have any memory of your father?"

"My mother moved away after I was born. I understand that he gave full custody to her."

"So when the crash happened, you had known him less than a few days?"

"That's right."

"When we started pulling people out of the wreckage, did you know where your father was at first?"

Walt nodded. "I could hear him screaming for me."

"How would you describe your relationship with your father in the first few weeks on the island?"

"It wasn't very good. He kept pulling me away from people that he thought were dangerous. He wouldn't let me make up my own mind."

"Would you say he was trying to protect you from what we all knew was a dangerous environment? Like any father would?"

Walt took a while before saying: "I guess so." Not the most ringing endorsement.

"Then he starting building a raft to get you off the island, and hopefully everybody else rescued. The night you set sail, the Others abducted you." This was going to be a risk. None of them knew what was coming next. Probably not even Juliet. "Please tell us what happened over the next two weeks."

Walt took a deep breath. "It was a nightmare. After they took me, they put a bag over my head, and we rode off. I never did find out for how long, or where exactly we went. When I regained consciousness, a group of people surrounded me. I never did find out who most of their names were. Except for this black woman named Miss Klugh. She was the one who seemed to be in charge. She told me how glad she was to see me, and that she knew I was special."

Jack wondered if he should press this point, then decided that it would be better to let Walt speak for himself.

"They started by taking samples of my blood and injecting me with stuff, and they kept asking me questions. At first, I didn't want to tell them anything, and for awhile, I refused to eat or answer their questions." Now Walt seemed uncomfortable. "That's when things started getting strange."

"What happened?"

"I kept trying to get a picture of my dad in my head. But for some reason, I couldn't. So I tried to get a picture of Vincent." Walt actually looked embarrassed. "Maybe I was thinking he could lead you guys to me."

That was a strange thought, but then again, Vincent had always been a very perceptive animal.

"Anyway, it didn't work. I would see him for like, flashes, for like a few seconds, but every time I tried to talk to him, my mouth felt like it was filled with cotton. Maybe it was whatever they were trying to drug me with." The fact that Walt was rationally trying to discuss teleportation should've been the oddest thing they were discussing yet, but it now seemed almost comprehensible. "But they seemed to know about it, somehow. They would yell at me and kept saying that bad things would happen if I kept being bad."

The Others had very weird definitions of what was considered 'bad', Jack remembered.

"Finally, after I'd done this like three or four times, they grabbed me, and locked me in a room." Walt had been a trooper up until now, but this was clearly a painful memory.

"Take your time."

"They hooked me up to this IV bag, and made me watch this weird movie. But it wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before. They would show a lot of images real quick, but I couldn't focus on any. Every now and then, I'd see a message, like 'We are the causes of our own suffering' or 'God loves you like he did Jacob.'

"Do you have any idea how long this went on for?"

"It seemed like forever. I completely lost track of time. Every once in awhile, a couple of them would come in, and ask if I'd be willing to talk. I kept telling them no, and they'd start the movie again. But after awhile, they'd come in less and less frequently. One or two would leave food, but after awhile, not even Miss Klugh would come in to see me."

Sawyer turned to Jack, and mouthed two word: _Room 23._ Jack nodded. He'd never paid a visit to the chamber on Hydra Island that the Others seemed to have to turned into their own private torture chamber, but he and Kate had given some rather detailed descriptions of what they had seen more they had escaped that particular realm of the Others.

"Eventually, they took me out of the room, put another bag over my head, and drugged me. When I woke up this time, we were somewhere else. A little village made up of huts. I don't know how long I was out this time, but something big had changed. "

"What exactly?"

"They would come in to make sure I got fed, and every so often, they would ask me a couple of questions, but they didn't seem as interested in the answers any more. They would always come in three or four at a time, and one of them would always be carrying a gun."

"Walt, at any time, were you ever allowed access to any communication, like a computer?"

Considering what they were talking about, it was a little bizarre that _this_ particular question got a weird look from Walt. "Of course not. They got scared when all I was trying to do was get pictures in my head. I didn't even see a computer the whole time I was on the island."

Jack knew this, but he thought it was important that this particular point - that the Others had tricked Michael in to his trek across the island - needed to be made clear for the tribunal. "Go on."

"I don't know how long this went on, but about a week before we left, they brought me into see my dad. " He looked at Michael for the first time. "I don't know what they had done to get him, but they only let me see him for three minutes. They told me to say that I was all right, but I told him that they were liars, and not to believe a word they said. "

"In the brief time that you saw him, how did your father look?"

Walt considered this. "He looked like he was even worse off than I'd been."

"Did you ever get a chance to explain to your father what they had done to you?"

"I didn't have to. He told me that all he wanted to do was save me."

Jack decided to let that be his last question.

Hurley got up slowly. It was clear that he didn't relish this particular part of what came next. "I only have a few questions," he said slowly. "When did your father tell you what he did to Ana Lucia and Libby?"

"On our way back to the mainland."

"How did you react to learning this?"

Walt hesitated. "I was upset."

"In fact, you told your dad that you never wanted to see him again." Hurley said slowly. "Even after everything he had done to save you."

"I was angry. He put the deaths of two people I never saw on me."

"And you held on to that anger for more than a year. Because it was something truly unforgivable."

"He did what he thought was right."

"Let me ask you something, Walt. Can you look us in the eyes", and now for the first time in the course of the trial, Hurley began to crack a little "and tell us that what your father did was the only option he had?"

Walt had been a good soldier in recounting most of the horrible treatment that he had endured on the island, but having to deal with this was clearly a blow that he was not prepared to deal with. "I - I don't know," he stammered. "I wish that there had been another way."

Hurley probably could have pressed Walt a bit harder and maybe gotten a reaction that could have won the case for his side, but it just wasn't in his nature to be that angry. "It's okay, dude. I don't have anything more to ask you."

Walt was the last witness. Jack had considered putting Michael on the stand to try and defend his actions - after all, he had been held prisoners by the Others for quite some time, and that had affected what he had done - but ultimately, he thought that it was a high-risk, low reward situation. They knew what had happened, they all knew he had lied, and even if the shooting of Libby had been accidental, he had killed Ana with malice of forethought. That could only make whatever decision the tribunal would make even worse.

Instead, they went into closing arguments. This time, Jack went first. His argument didn't take as long to make as his opening had. He told them that they had known what the Others were capable of before they had heard Walt's testimony. That given all the abuse and desperation that had been behind what Michael had been through that he had been pushed to his limit. That he had done what he done not because he was as cold-blooded and ruthless as his captors had been, but because he had been pushed to his breaking point, and then several feet beyond it. It was wrong, but it was not unjustifiable.

Hurley's closing, however, was a lot more intense. "The island was a strange place. None of us can deny that. I don't think any of us will ever fully understand what was going on there. But the reason that all of us came away from it better of was because of who we met, and who we talked to. _We trusted each other._ " He looked at the defense table. "Michael violated that trust. Worse, he put his own interest above the groups He could've told us he was communicating with Walt. He didn't. He could've taken one of us out on his trek for safety. He chose not to. When he came back to the hatch, he told a lie about what he had seen. And then, in order to save his son, he killed two innocent people, and liberated the leader of the Others, a man who had been responsible for all the horrible things that happened on the island. He tricked four people - including me - on a trek across the island that could've gotten us all killed. And he sold us all out, so that he and his son could leave the rest of us behind."

Jack had never heard Hurley sound so angry in all the time he'd known him.

"The defense will tell you that Michael was manipulated by the Others as well. He's right. But that only goes so far, and it certainly doesn't excuse the level which he went to, or his actions afterward. The defense will tell you that Michael had suffered a great deal since he has returned to the real world. He probably has. But suffering is not the same thing as answering for what he has done. What happened on the island may have been under different circumstances than what happened in the real world, but in the real world, when someone kills another person, he must answer for it. The law that exists here may not be able to do anything. Which is why its up to us. The only way we can answer what has happened is by making Michael pay for it."

Hurley walked back to his table. For someone who had never been within shouting distance of college, he had done a masterful job. Jack was almost convinced by his summation.

Sayid thanked both of them for their time, and said that they would try to have a decision as quickly as possible.

No one knew quite what to do next. This was often the part in all the legal dramas they had seen where the two sides tried to negotiate a deal of some kind. But neither Jack nor Hurley thought that they could've done that because neither of them knew what kind of punishment would fit the crime.

None of them were sure what kind of punishment the tribunal would try to come up with. What kind of sentence could they hand down? How would they be able to make sure Michael could serve it? There were only two real options available that they could carry out: acquittal or death. And nobody thought that even Sayid would be able to cold-bloodedly execute a man he'd known for nearly two months, with the full knowledge of his son learning of the punishment..(Of course, none of them knew exactly what he'd done in the Republican Guard.) Was that the reason Sayid had asked to serve on this tribunal?

Perhaps the decision could've been made if Walt had been more willing to offer some guidance. But even though they had spent a fair amount of time in the room together, Walt still seemed unwilling to make a move towards his father. It was clear from his expression that his testimony had been an ordeal, but even knowing all this, it was obvious that there was still a lot of bitterness on his part for having to bear that burden on top of everything else that he'd gone through.

Jack would've been more than willing to make some kind of arrangement - something to end this enormous tension. But he had no idea of what, and he didn't think Hurley would've gone along with it in any event. He wasn't sure what Hugo would do if the verdict turned against him - as easy-going as he was, he had been incredibly inflexible when it came to this. Considering what was involved, Jack didn't think he could blame him; besides, he was the last person who could give a lecture when it came to stubbornness.

He wasn't sure how long the tribunal would deliberate before making a decision. In one sense, they would need to think about it for awhile. In another, they had had over a year to consider it. If anything, some of them had had more time then others.

So it was somehow shocking and not really a surprise at all that Juliet called them later that day, and told them that the tribunal had reached a decision.

It was impossible to read what the tribunal was thinking when they came in: Sayid had always been stoic, and Juliet had a great poker face. Everybody was clearly trying to see what Claire thought, as she had by far been the most honest person on the island, but she managed to keep her face perfectly blank. Jack wondered, perhaps too late, if it had been wrong to have her do this, so soon after so much had already been heaped upon her.

Sayid looked at the others, before opening with a surprising statement. "Is there anyway this situation can be resolved between both sides? Jack?"

Jack blinked, then answered. "I don't think so."

"Hurley?" Claire this time.

Hurley had always had trouble refusing Claire - Charlie was always there between them. But this time, he stood firm. "I'm sorry. I wish I could, but I think you guys have to."

"Will you accept whatever we decision we have reached?"

Jack knew that something bad could still come of all this, but he was determined not to give up. He looked at Michael, just to be sure, before he nodded.

"Hurley?"

Hurley took a much longer pause. He looked at Michael, then Walt, then Jack. Finally, he faced his friends. "I believe you'll make the right decision."

Sayid's face actually seemed to soften for a moment before returning to perfect blankness. Once again Jack was relieved that he didn't have to make this decision - he would never have managed to be as impartial and as fair as his friends could. Then again, maybe he was overestimating his friends - and his sister.

"This has not been an easy decision for us to make," Sayid began. "It is difficult to deliver impartial justice when dealing with complete strangers; it's even harder to do it with a person you know, and at one point, may have considered to be a friend. Nevertheless, we are probably the people who can best determine whether or not Michael deserves to be punished for his actions."

"The Others may have claimed to be the good guys. It's possible they even were. Not even the woman who spent three years working with them can say with certainty. They visited great pain upon us the three months we were on the island, and we visited just as much pain on them. But the fact remains, all of the torture they meted out upon the island was especially traumatic on all of us. And one of the things we can agree on is that no one suffered more, directly or indirectly, then Michael. That did play a critical role in our decision."

"Now admittedly, there is very little that can excuse taking the life of another human being, let alone two. But the fact is , with only a couple of exceptions, none of us left the island without some blood on our hands. We had reasonable cause, some might say, but that doesn't make those people any less dead." His eyes didn't seem to quite match up with what he was saying for a moment. Jack suspected he was thinking about Shannon. He was thinking about the marshal. "His reasons for doing it may have been better, but that doesn't change the fact that, unlike most of people who ended up dead, he knew the people he killed, and lied about it afterward."

"So, as much as we would like to be reasonable, we decided, by a vote of 2-1, that Michael is responsible for the deaths of two people, and must therefore beheld accountable." Sayid held up a hand. "However, once we determine that, the far more difficult decision comes in regard to sentencing. Death, we all agreed would be far too draconian to deliver to him. And considering that we all escaped a tropical prison, sending him to a more fitting one would be unfair. However, after some discussion, we have thought of a sentence that we think would be more fitting."

Sayid looked across at Jack's side of the table. "Michael Dawson, we hereby sentence you to three years of banishment. During that period of time, you shall not approach any of us or your son. If at any time you violate this admonition, an additional six months shall be added to your sentence. Given that you spent essentially the past year and a half obeying that directive, we shall allow that to account for time served. The final sentence has been handed down as eighteen months."

Sayid looked at Michael, and his expression softened. "It is the understanding of this tribunal that you made several attempts on your life in the interval between returning to New York, and meeting us again. It is our unanimous plea - and hopefully, the decision of everybody connected with the crash of our plane - that you don't take this sentence as an excuse to try again. Life is a precious thing. That was made enormously clear on the island, and fairly recently to the rest of us. The world is a sadder place without Ana Lucia or Libby in it. It would be far sadder if you were to leave it as well."

"A period of no more than one week will be given before you are to begin serving your sentence. We hope that you use this time to find a way for the process of healing to begin. For all our sakes." He looked at him. "The affairs of this tribunal are concluded. "

Jack's first concern was for his friend. Michael seemed to take the decision of being cast out a lot better than he would. Maybe it was because he'd already spent the last year and a half being banished from his friends. Or maybe it was just because the pressure that had been on top of him ever since he had shot both women had finally been resolved.

As always, his greatest concern was for his son. Walt had been quiet ever giving his testimony, earlier that day. But after the verdict, he walked up to his father, and said something that none of them, not even Michael would've expected to hear. "I forgive you, Dad."

All of the effort that Michael had managed to maintain keeping his facade together throughout the trial, collapsed with those four words. "I'm sorry, Walt. I'm sorry I told you everything. I'm sorry I let you go."

"It wasn't your fault. Haven't you figured that out by now?"

Michael's sobs shook his body for a long time. "I just wanted to make sure you'll be taken care of. I just want you to be okay."

"He will be."

Everybody looked up at the source of that voice in surprise. Hurley was standing above him.

"I promised your mom that your kid would be okay. And I'm going to keep my word."

"You're okay with all this?" Jack hadn't been sure how Hurley was going to take all this.

"I'm not like, thrilled. But the decision was fair. And now that it's been given out, I'm more than willing to try and find a way to forgive you."

Michael looked at Hurley. "Do you think you can?"

"Not now. But in a year and a half, maybe." Hurley turned to Walt. "And in any case, your son shouldn't have to keep paying for his fathers mistakes.

Michael seemed hopeful for the first time Jack had seen him. "Have you figured out how to let the world know how my son came back from the dead?"

Hurley nodded. "We've been working on a way to figure it out for the last few days. Hopefully, by the time you - have to leave, we'll finally be able to put it into operation. Don't worry, Walt'll be taken care of"

Michael looked at the only person who Hurley had ever hated. "I am sorry. For everything. All of it. You have to know that, Hugo."

"I do now, Mike. Maybe some day - hopefully some day soon - it'll be enough."


	13. Chapter 12, Part 1

**Chapter 12A**

 **Coming close to the end, folks. The penultimate chapter is so long, I decided it made more sense to cut it in two. Here's Kate's trial, and a familiar face to those David E. Kelley fans among you.**

It would've been nice if, having finished with the ordeal of dealing with Michael, Jack and his friends would've been allowed a fair amount of peace.. But less than a week after Michael began to serve his sentence, they found that they had to deal with a real trial. The Los Angeles ADA was ready to begin her prosecution of Kate.

Considering the nature of the main focus of the prosecution, Jack was more than willing to be the one who met with Alan Shore about the nature of the case. Shore had done his due diligence, and was more than willing to be forthright about what charges Kate was facing.

"First of are all of the lesser charges that Kate encountered when she was on the run," he began. "About two years after the main case, Kate returned to St. Louis to visit her mother. When her mother screamed for help, the doctor who was assisting her, a Tom Brennan drove away, and in the escapes, he was accidentally shot. Glazebrook is pushing the term by trying to charge Kate with felony murder."

"There's charges for participation in an armed robbery in New Mexico. She worked with three other robbers to steal a safe deposit box. However, when it became clear that people were about to die, she wounded her three accomplices, in order to get out of there. I was able to find some witnesses who were willing to testify to that account, so again, those charges won't be a huge problem. There are also more than a few counts of fraud, and identity theft, but they go part and parcel with a life on the run."

"Which leaves us with the main charge." Alan looked at Jack. "Wayne Janssen, Kate's stepfather, was a drunken lout who abused her mother, and at the very least, let her daughter live in an abusive environment for more than fifteen years. Kate made sure that her mother was out of the house, before she rigged it to explode with him still in it. If Kate's testimony is right, the guy was fall down drunk when he died, so my guess is he left this world feeling no pain. She arranged an insurance payout to set up her mother for life, and got the hell out of there. Her mother didn't even given her an hour to get away before she called the police."

Jack had heard bits and pieces of this from Kate and other sources for the past two years, but hearing it for the first time in full, it actually didn't sound nearly as bad as he'd built it up to be ever since he'd seen Kate's 'Wanted' poster the day after the crash. "What are her chances? Realistically?" he asked.

"The robbery charge will probably be reduced by the time we go to trial," Shore told him. "The felony murder charge is going to be a little harder to get around - Brennan had a wife and baby when he died, so Glazebrook will probably push it as hard as she can, but it's still something of a reach, and I think I can get around it. Which leaves us with the big kahuna. Wayne Janssen's murder. No way around it: it was premeditated, however bad a job she may have done in planning it. Glazebrook is going to go for Murder Two."

Jack really wished Kate had let him in a little more. "Wasn't Kate subject to abuse herself?" he asked.

"The psychiatrist that I called in to examine her thinks its pretty clear she was. But Kate won't admit it, either to me or to her. Even if there was none, there is the fact that being raised in the same house as a violent, abusive drunk is going to count as a mitigating factor. And honestly, as defenses go, I've been able to do a lot more than with what she went through." Shore took a deep breath. "Which is probably why Glazebrook is going to base her case around one witness. Diane Janssen."

Jack frowned. "Kate told me she had cancer the last time she saw her, and that was nearly three years ago."

"She still has it. The woman is coming off her deathbed to testify against her own daughter. This couldn't be more like a soap opera if I planned it."

"You don't have to sound as if you're enjoying it so much." The words were out before Jack could stop them.

"Mr. Shephard, you and Mr. Reyes are paying my legal bills, because you know about my reputation." Shore didn't even seem hurt by the accusation. "And at least part of that involves getting off criminals who are far more guilty then Kate is, or at least were far less repentant. You're right, though. I am enjoying myself. For once, I get to use my considerable skills to get a woman who doesn't deserve to be in prison out of it."

Jack looked at him. "You just gave a fairly extensive rap sheet."

"And no doubt the prosecution will try to paint it as such. But I've spent a fair amount of time with Kate over the last few weeks, and everything about her seems to cry out that she wants to be punished far more than she's actually guilty. She was through more of an ordeal in her life then many of us are unfortunate to be, and that's before she got stranded on a deserted island for three months. Which is why, when I mount my defense, I'm going to try and make character an issue."

Jack had just _been_ a defense attorney, and he still had no idea what was being planned. "How are you going to do that?"

"This is where things get difficult, Jack." Alan told him, with the first real note of solemnity in his voice. "Wayne Janssen was a monster. He beat his wife for twenty years, and most likely did the same to his daughter. If Kate had just shot him where he stood, at any point in that time, I would have an easier time with my defense. But this was planned for awhile, and unfortunately the law, while it has a certain leniency towards battered wives, doesn't seem to do the same to their relatives. And considering that Kate's first instinct was to run as far away as she could, rather than face the law, she seems to know that what she did was wrong. So arguing justification is nearly impossible, particularly as her mother seems more interested in punishing her daughter than admitting her abuse. And its hard for me to argue that she wasn't a felon, given her history of criminal behavior after the murder."

"You still haven't explained how you're going to get Kate out."

"Her best bet is for me to convince a jury of her peers that what Kate Austen did was right, and the law was wrong."

Now was not the time to tell Shore just how messy a judicial system that had turned out to be on the island. "That seems pretty close to impossible," Jack said instead.

"That's why its a good thing you've hired me," Alan Shore gave a smile that reminded him a little close to comfort of Ben Linus.. "I've done it before."

"What does Kate think of all this?"

Shore actually seemed a little more human than he had so far. "She's not looking forward to facing her mother in court. I can't imagine I would be either."

"Her mother wasn't even there when we showed up in Hawaii. But to send her daughter to prison-"

"That is despicable, and this is coming from a man with a much less accurate moral compass than yours." Shore admitted grimly. "Honestly, I think there are only two people in the world who wanted to see Kate go to prison. Unfortunately, they're both on the prosecution's team."

"You mentioned Kate's mother. Who's the second?"

"Marshal Edward Mars' partner. Honestly, you're lucky the man died in the crash. Something about him and the case makes me feel that Kate would never have lived to see trial. Too much history."

Now they were treading on shaky ground. "You going to bring that up in court?"

"It's going to come up. Mars' partner, Jerry Samuel says that he spent the better part of three years trying to chase Kate Austen down. Mars was reprimanded twice for the fact that he came so close to catching her, and kept missing her. Three times, he wanted the terms of her capture to be raised to Dead or Alive."

This part Jack had never heard. He was willing to be that Kate hadn't known it either. Then again, considering that he had tracked Kate to Australia carrying five 9 mm handguns pretty much was a giveaway that she just wasn't any other fugitive. "That doesn't mean she's any less guilty."

"The government's mainly into tracking terrorists now. There's no reason a woman with this limited a criminal record warranted this kind of obsession from law enforcement. " Shore paused. "This is a winnable case, and I am a very good attorney. Which is why I'm surprised Glazebrook hasn't come to be with some kind of plea bargain."

"I thought you wanted to try this." Jack was surprised.

"I'm a good attorney. But I can't read what a jury's going to do, much less an LA jury. And she's a beautiful, white woman in her twenties. Juries don't have a problem convicting them even if their innocent." Shore held up a hand. "I don't make the system. I just wallow in it."

"How'd the jury selection go?" Jack asked.

"I did the best I could. Problem is, there are two conflicting views on how jury trials work. Defense attorneys say, the last people you want judging your clients fate are twelve people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors say, a good man is hard to find, but finding twelve of them in a courtroom is a miracle."

"Who do you think is right this time?" Jack tried to ask, as if he didn't care about the response.

"Two days until opening statements, and Glazebrook hasn't even tried to make an offer." Shore said. "She must feel that this time, I got the short end."

About the only reasonable thing that the DA had done about the entire trial was agree that there were to be no cameras inside the courtroom. Shore had signed off on the motion, but had told Kate up front that it wasn't likely to make a big difference for a couple of reasons.

First, given how many trials the city of Los Angeles had lost while there had been cameras in the courtroom, it was probably another sign that they were more afraid of losing in the court of public opinion than in the actual courtroom. And secondly, given the amount of media attention that had been gathered around the courthouse when they had been walking in and out, it wasn't like the media wasn't going to be scandalously underrepresented when it came to People V. Katherine Austen.

"I did the best that I could in jury selection," Shore told Kate the night before opening statements. "But trying to find people who are completely impartial when it comes to you was going to be extremely difficult if we'd held the trial in Anchorage. We're just going to have the hope that they're going to be willing to listen."

Shore had told her that the prosecution had, for one of the rare occasions, a shorter witness list than the defense. However, when Kate had seen it, she had gotten considerably pale. They had gone through her entire history as a fugitive, and seemed determined to find everybody in her history who she had lied to, deceived, or otherwise defrauded, and she knew that it was a pretty long list. She was actually surprised that Ray Mullen, the farmer she had worked for three months in Australia hadn't been flown in. Then again, considering that after the car had crashed, she had basically sacrificed her freedom in order to make sure he was okay, probably wouldn't help Glazebrook's portrait of her as a soulless criminal.

The first witness that she did call, however, didn't help much. In all the years that Ed Mars had been chasing her, she had almost gotten to know him like a friend. But for all that time, she had never known about his partner. Jerry Samuel's testimony, was, in a colder way, much more devastating than Mars could've been. He went, line by line, through every offense and crime that Kate had been through for the past four years. How Mars had followed her trail, and completed a lengthy dossier on everything that she had lied to over the years. Even knowing about it firsthand, she was appalled hearing it. She wondered what her friends, who knew about it as well as the horrible things she'd done on the island, would think.

Shore, however, was more prepared, perhaps because he had clearly heard worse. "How long were you and Edward Mars partnered?" he asked.

"For about seven years."

"During that time, were there any other criminals that Mr. Mars formed this kind of obsession with bringing in?"

"I wouldn't call it that." Samuels seemed a little uncomfortable with this.

"Really? Defense exhibit 3. This is a reprimand that Mars received from the Marshal's service six months before his death. Would you please read it?"

:"Having expended nearly two years and half a million dollars pursuing Miss Austen, we feel that it would be in the service's best interest to move on to more urgent cases." Samuels looked like he'd swallowed a lemon.

"What day did the tip come in that Kate was in Australia?"

"August 29."

"And when did Mr. Mars finally get approval to go down to Sydney, and pick up the fugitive?"

"September 15."

"That's nearly three weeks. Why such a delay?"

Samuels shifted. "There's always a fair amount of paperwork, when an extradition request is filed."

"Really?" Shore seemed surprised. "It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the initial request was denied?"

"The marshal's service had trouble getting to pick up a dangerous fugitive? Sounds a bit of a reach, even for government work. Tell me, what was your partner's reaction to these delays?" Samuels clearly didn't want to answer. "You're under oath, sir."

"He offered to pay the airfare there and back out of his own pocket."

"That's more than fourteen thousand dollars. That's almost a third of his salary. "

"He was very devoted to his job." Samuels pushed.

"Sounds more like he bore a grudge against the one who got away." Shore told him.

The effect of the cross was pretty damaging. Unfortunately, the next group of witnesses didn't help much.

They had found Kevin, for one thing. Kate had been hoping like hell that somehow the prosecution would avoid the policeman she'd been married to for nearly six blissful months, before she'd drugged him and run away. She'd hoped that he'd been too humiliated by what had happened to him to come into court and compound it, not to mention lose his job in the process.

But she'd underestimated her capacity to piss people off with her action. Detective Kevin Callis had shown up in his best testifying suit, and had gone into great detail about how he'd fallen in love with 'Monica', how they'd had a whirlwind romance, how his mother had given her their grandmother's wedding ring, and how they'd been happy - before she'd disappeared without a trace. How he'd never had the nerve to tell anyone about his humiliation, and how'd he'd tried to put it behind him - until the survivors of Oceanic had shown up in Hawaii. Then the world knew who he'd gotten married to, then the reporters had tracked him down, then he'd had to turn in his detective shield - even though police work had never been the same for him after he'd learned he'd been betrayed.

Shore had wanted to go after him on the stand, but Kate had persuaded him not to, so he'd held his questions to asking why he hadn't tried to pursue Kate afterwards given his resources. Kevin's answer had been simple. "Why let myself be subjected to my greatest failure as a cop?"

The next witness had been even more painful. Lisa Brennan, Tom's wife. Shore had objected because there was no evidentiary value to her testifying - she knew next to nothing of Tom and Kate's relationship, she couldn't testify to any level of her criminal activities, she was there purely to get an emotional reaction. But for some reason - the judge seemed to have been reasonable up until this point - he let her get away with it, maybe to prove the fact that what she had done had not been a victimless crime.. Brennan's testimony was brief, and to the point - she started weeping halfway through it, and Shore didn't even bother trying to object to her being there as a beard, perhaps because he intended to try something similar when it was time to put forth his defense.

The prosecution, according to Shore, would have tried to present its case as quickly as possible. But after Tom's wife finished testifying, they adjourn for the day. Glazebrook had said she wanted to make sure that her final witness was prepared for the day's events. Shore didn't buy that for a second.

"Considering the state of your mother's health, I'd think that they'd want to have her testify before it becomes physically unfeasible for her.," Alan said bluntly. "The only reason for delay is to make sure those twelve good citizens have a day more to mull over what a bitch you are before she really gets to turn on the waterworks."

"They can pretty up the story as much as they want," Kate told her mouthpiece angrily. "It doesn't change the facts that she called the cops on me after I sacrificed everything for her"

"I know that, and you know that. But based on what you told me about the next time you went to see her, she doesn't seem to care about that. Which is going to make her very persuasive." Alan considered this for a few moments.

"When your friends hired me, they told me to do everything in my power to get you out," he said slowly. "However, right now, that includes tearing apart a dying, abused woman in a wheelchair. Now, I need to know are you certain that you want me to do that?"

Kate thought about this, especially considering that she hadn't seen her mother in nearly three years. It took a lot less time then she would have thought. "Shred her."

"There's a good chance it might kill her." If there was any conflict, Alan was being as neutral as he could.

"When Tom died, he risked everything for me to see my mother. You know what she did when she gained the strength to speak." Alan nodded at this. "One way or another, this is probably the last time I'll see her. She needs to understand what this did to me. What it was like. Do your fucking worst."

The next day, Glazebrook began her examination of Diane Janssen. Kate knew that she had to have hospital records dating back nearly a quarter of a century, detailing the abuse and brutality that Wayne had dealt upon her mother. She had to know what a huge risk that is was to put this woman on the stand, knowing what was coming on cross. Even so, what happened was truly amazing, considering what she knew.

Diane wept throughout her statement, which was remarkable considering the number of outright lies she was telling. Wayne was a good man. Sure, he had his faults, but so did her first husband. She had done her best to raise her daughter with most reasonable set of values. Of course she had loved Kate. But she had always loved her husband more. And knowing what her daughter had done had just about broken her heart. (Kate wasn't sure her mother even _had_ one.) So she had called the marshal's on her daughter.

Yes, she loved her, and she knew what a sacrifice her daughter had made, but she knew that she couldn't lie to the police. The back and forth went on like this for nearly an hour, which was rather remarkable, considering that all Diane was saying was the same thing over and over. Her husband was flawed, but he didn't deserve to be murdered.

Alan Shore just sat still for a few seconds, trying to figure out where to begin exactly. Finally, he started with a laugh. "I apologize, your honor. It's just that Mrs. Janssen has had nearly five years to come up a defense for what she did, and that was the best she was able to come up with."

"Objection" Glazebrook said.

"Really? I'd save your strength for later. You're going to have a lot to object to in the next few minutes."

"Your Honor!"

"Careful, Mr. Shore."

"The day your daughter came to see you, you had a bruise on your elbow. Do you recall how you got it?"

"Not really. I think I may have banged it against the counter."

"That happened a lot, actually." He went over to his table, picked up a folder, and presented her with a dossier nearly four inches thick. "I haven't bothered to mark all these defense exhibits, because, well, we'd be here until the next week going over them one by one. But let's just take these three examples: May 15, 1992: you came to a hospital with a black eye. June 13 1993, a different hospital, you had two broken ribs. October 17, 1994, the defendant brought you into yet another hospital, because she had found you lying on the floor with a nose that wouldn't stop bleeding. In all three of these cases, you refused to say how you received the injury, all three times you checked yourself AMA, and the last two times, we have your daughter practically begging you to press charges." He handed them to Diane. "This is your signature, correct?"

Her mother's expression never changed. "That's right."

"I never knew that being a waitress could be nearly as dangerous a profession as being a stuntwoman. Withdrawn." Alan waved his handed, at the rising Glazebrook. "We have nearly two dozen of these reports in nine different hospitals in the state of Missouri, and that, of course, doesn't include all the other injuries that just weren't serious enough for you to need to be checked out. I can't believe I have to be the one who actually raises the question: did your husband beat you?"

Kate expected Glazebrook to leap into the air. She was frozen. Perhaps she finally realized that there really was no good way to object to this, without making herself seem like the monster.

Diane looked pale and withdrawn, and like it was taking her all her energy to remain stoic. Nevertheless, her expression didn't change. "That has nothing to do with it."

"Answer the question, Mrs. Janssen." All the coyness was out of Alan's voice was gone now; there was nothing but predator present.

"She didn't have any right to do what.."

"Instruct the witness to answer the question, your Honor."

"Miss Janssen..."

"I loved Wayne. He was everything to me."

"Yes. I know. You were married to another man before Wayne, a Major Samuel Austen. Yet you were having an affair with Wayne well before you divorced him."

"Objection. Relevance." Melissa Glazebrook was up again.

"A little latitude, your Honor." Alan said.

"You're treading a thin line, Mr. Shore, but so far, you haven't crossed it." The judge overruled the objected.

"I have a deposition from Major Austen that he filed for custody twice, but you refused to grant it, on multiple occasions. What exactly was your thinking there, Miss Janssen?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your daughter, Miss Janssen, the one you seemed willing to send to prison. Do you love her?" Alan seemed a little curious now.

"Of course I do."

"Then why on earth would you want her to stay in this house? What kind of atmosphere does it mean for her if she had spend her childhood living in the same house as an abusive, wife-beating drunk?"

"Objection. Calls for speculation."

"Oh come on." For the first time, Alan sounded genuinely angry. "You're not going to contest the abuse, are you? Make me call to the stand two dozen doctors and God knows how many nurses to confirm what we all know really happened?"

"Your honor."

"She knows there was abuse! The doctors knew! Her friends knew! The defendant knew because she lived there! The only person who didn't seem to know or care about the abuse was you!"

"I LOVED HIM!" Diane's control finally broke. But unlike all the courtroom dramas Kate had seen, her resolve - and denial - remained firmed. "We can't help who we love! And she took him away from me! She had no right to do that!"

"And when did that right go away, Mrs. Janssen? Until your husband decided to turn his attention to your daughter? Or did that never enter your thinking at all?" Alan held up his hand. "You don't have to answer that. I'm not going to suborn perjury."

"Objection!" Glazebrook now sounded extremely tired herself.

"Withdrawn. I have nothing further."

The judge called for a recess. It probably didn't matter much, because the prosecution had no further witnesses.


	14. Chapter 12 Part 2

"Well, the good news is, the jury probably thinks that the witnesses the prosecution put up have been stained irrevocably." Alan told her that evening. "The problem is, she's presented enough prima facie evidence so that I can't make a motion to dismiss. I'll move for a directed verdict, but there's no way that we'll get it."

"So how do you intend to mount a defense?" Kate asked.

"Fortunately, my witness list is a bit longer than the prosecution's, and has more famous people." Alan said. "Your friends from the plane crash are more than willing to testify to your character. The problem is, all of that takes place after you went on the run. At some point, Glazebrook's going to cut me off, and the judge is going to let her."

"Have you interviewed any of my friends?" Kate tried to act nonchalant about this, but it was a matter of major concern to her. The story they had told about the crash, their time on an island, and their apparent rescue had never been questioned that harshly by the media. This, however, would open them up to all new kinds of difficulties.

Admittedly, there was nobody who could testify to their lying who was around. But Kate was not at all comfortable with the people who loved her undergoing closer scrutiny and possibly going to jail with her.

"I've talked to five of them. My paralegals have been doing the rest. You come out rather well, which doesn't shock me." Alan looked at her with that same narrow gaze he had fixed Samuels with. "What does bother me is how in lockstep their stories seems to be. And that, Miss Austen, worries me a lot."

Considering all the time that Kate had spent as a fugitive, she had never been a very good liar. It was more of a testament for how long she had been on the run that no one had never called her on it until she had ended up in Australia. And she had seen how easily Alan had ground into the dirt her own mother. So she decided that she had to phrase things very carefully with her lawyer.

"What about our story gives you so much trouble?" she asked.

"As to specifics, I have no idea. You survived a plane crash, spent nearly a hundred days stranded on a desert island, and somehow managed to get off that island and back to civilization. I know for damn sure I could never have done the same in your position. It's heroic. It's part of the reason I agreed to take on this case, because I've never met people like you and your friends." Alan gave a self-deprecating shrug. "I don't know whether that says more about you or less about me. But even knowing everything you've been through before you came to the island, I still can't turn off my IBSD."

"Excuse me?"

"Internal Bullshit Detector. And it's telling me that there's more to your story, something that you and your friends are lying about. To your families, to the media, to me." Alan looked her dead in the eye. "And since you've been very forthright about everything that happened involving you and your mother, I can't imagine why you'd lie about something remarkable like that."

This was what Kate had been worried about. "What do you think it is?"

"I don't know. I can't wrap my mind around what you might have to do in order to survive on a deserted island. It can't be anything criminal because God knows, if the South Pacific isn't outside the jurisdiction of the country, I don't know what the hell is. And I don't think its anything you should be ashamed of, because there can't be any real limits on what you need to do in order to survive. So I don't know. However, the fact of the matter is, I'm a very good attorney, but I am very good at skating by the ethics of my profession."

This came as something of a shock to Kate. When Hurley had hired Alan Shore, he had done so because the man had a reputation for winning big cases in Boston. He had a reputation for being a firebrand and arguing for those who didn't have a voice. The idea that he might somehow be more sketchy than just about every other lawyer hadn't occurred to her. "What do you need to know?" she asked.

"Talking in hypothetical, is there anything that your friends could testify to that could hurt you?"

"I don't think so. I never told them about what I did in the real world."

"They didn't know you were a fugitive?"

"They did. They eventually found out. But none of that ever affected their opinion of me."

"Did any of them know what crimes you committed?"

"I told Jack and James at various times I was responsible for the death of a man. I never went into details, and they never asked further questions. I never told them who it was."

"Did you tell anyone you killed your stepfather?"

"As far as I know, they only learned about it when we returned to civilization."

"You were with them for three months, and it never came up?" Alan thought for a second. "Then again, if you were rummaging about for food or shelter, the last thing you'd probably talk about was your rap sheet."

"Does that change your mind?"

"I was never going to call James Ford. The man went to prison, and has a longer record than you; not exactly the best character witness. Add to that the fact that he was nearly charged for sneaking you into a hospital, Glazebrook would cut him to ribbons."

Kate decided not to tell her attorney that James was more than capable of taking care of himself. He might even be able to con the jury.

" As for Dr. Shephard..." He trailed off, clearly thinking. "He'd be a very strong witness in your favor. I can't deny that he'd be very persuasive. Of course, there is a fairly obvious problem with his testimony."

She knew as well as he did what that problem could be. The question was, did the DA know about it as well?

"That's only a minor concern right now," Alan said shrugging off the unspoken problem. "My major concern is this. If I put him on the stand, will I be suborning perjury?"

He was speaking in hypotheticals again. "That depends entirely on how closely you intend to question him about what happened when we were stranded."

"I just need to know is there anything that happened there that was criminal."

The million dollar question. Considering that Kate had shot two people when she was on the island, both times in the presence of Jack, the answer was 'Yes'. However, nobody knew who those people were, and it had no relevance to what she was being tried for - unless somehow Glazebrook was an Other.

"I don't think that there's anything that Jack can say that would hurt me." she said slowly. "At least nothing relevant to what I'm being charged with."

"All right then" Alan told her. "Then we'll go forward."

Glazebrook was sharp, though. She had looked at the witness list that Alan had submitted, and had argued that putting up survivors from the crash were irrelevant to any kind of defense that he might put up. Character witnesses were traditionally something that were only put up during the penalty phase, and obviously they weren't there yet. Alan argued that character was clearly something that was at issue, at least as far as the prosecution had been pushing in its presentation.

In the end, the judge had compromised, and said that he would allow three survivors of the crash to testify in to the defendant's behavior. But if he sensed that Shore was filibustering because he had no major evidence to present he was going to cut him off. Glazebrook reluctantly acquiesced.

The first to testify was Claire, who had been arguably Kate's closest friend on the island. Considering that she had been the most honest person about everything after the crash, it was small wonder that she has pressed for her. Even her edited story was one of the better choices Shore could've picked. She'd had become friends with an eight-month pregnant girl, had helped her deliver her child on a deserted island, had helped her search the island for medicine when Aaron had gotten sick, and had been vital in trying to get them all of the island. When she had found out that Kate was a criminal, it hadn't changed her opinion of her in the slightest.. Glazebrook didn't even bother to cross examine her.

Second was Sun, who next to Claire had been Kate's closest friend on the island. She said, despite the fact that she barely understood English, Kate had gone out her way to befriend her. She had been with her trying to grow a garden, had helped her take a pregnancy test, and had been by her side through the travails on the island.

This time, however, Glazebrook did cross. "Your father is the head of Paik Automotive?" was his first question.

Sun actually seemed prepared for this one. "That's correct."

"You're aware that Interpol has been investigating your father for being the head of organized crime?"

"Considering my husband ended up working for my father, and it nearly destroyed our marriage, yes I am aware of that."

Glazebrook seemed a little thrown by this, but carried on "Your father managed a very effective career lying to the world. How can the court be sure that you're not doing the same to protect a friend?"

"My father is a monster. If it wasn't for him, my husband and I would never have been on that plane to begin with. I know more than anyone else how much damage lying to the world can do to people. For years, I put up a front to keep myself safe. I'm not going to do that ever again."

It was a bold statement. The fact that Sun was, in a best case scenario, being disingenuous, made it all the more remarkable. Kate was glad she'd never played poker with her.

The last witness Alan called was Jack. Kate was really not sure about this part. Jack had always been a terrible liar... when they were on the island. Ever since he had been on TV telling the story of the survivors of Oceanic 815, he'd become much better at it. That said, she knew that of the people her attorney was calling, his was the most important.

"Dr. Shephard, when did you first find out about my clients criminal record?"

"I first learned the nature of her crimes when we returned to civilization," Good legal phrasing. The wanted poster that the marshal had held didn't give the exact nature of her crimes.

"What was your reaction when you learned about that?"

"I was stunned. It didn't seem compatible with the woman I'd come to know on the island."

"What was your relationship with her on the island?"

"I think I didn't treat her as well as I could've while we were there. I was always trying to protect her from the harder choices that needed to be made. And I didn't want her to be in danger when we had to do the stuff that we needed to do in order to survive."

"Could you be more specific?"

"We made treks across the island to try and find supplies, people who got lost, and ultimately the trips that we needed in order to get rescued. I almost never let her come along on these trips, but she always seemed to follow us."

This was pretty vague, but it was just coded enough so that there was truth to it. Jack was leaving out the perpetual scowl he seemed to have on whenever Kate ended up following him, but otherwise there was a fair amount of honesty here.

"Is there anything about her behavior on the island that would lead you to believe that Miss Austen was a criminal?'

"If anything, it was the opposite. Every time something needed to be done that might end up getting us rescued, Kate was always the first to volunteer. The island we were on may have been the only place in the entire world where there was nobody chasing her, and yet she did everything she could to help us, even though the end result would have been her ending up being back in handcuffs."

"Now, Dr. Shephard, about two months ago, Miss Austen was captured when she came to your hospital. Prior to that, when was the last time that you had contact with her?"

"Around the time the DA decided that she was going to charge her."

"So, in other words, you hadn't had any contact with her for a year when she showed up again, even though she was aware that three federal agencies were waiting, just on the possibility she might show up."

"That's right."

"Why then, do you think that she showed up at all?"

"Claire was her closest friend on the island. She helped deliver her baby. Those kind of bonds don't go away." Jack paused. "That's the kind of person I knew on the island."

"I have no further questions."

This time, Glazebrook did cross examine. "Dr. Shephard, are you in love with the defendant?"

"Objection."

"Goes to credibility."

"Overruled."

"I developed very serious feelings for her at one point. But that has nothing to do with my testimony."

"Come on. You fell in love with her on the island. You were so damaged by her disappearance that you relocated to a different hospital. You're helping pay for her legal bills."

"Because unlike the rest of my friends, she isn't a millionaire." Jack didn't seem that phased yet.

"You honestly expect the jury to believe that you wouldn't do anything to make sure that the defendant stayed out of prison?" Glazebrook seemed determined to find a chink in Jack's armor.

"I'm not saying Kate is a saint. But she's also not the hardened, cold-blooded killer you make her out to be. Nothing you say here will ever make me believe that."

Glazebrook considered this for a few seconds, then finally said. "No more questions."

At that point, Alan called for a recess until the next day.

"I've done as good a job as I can to brighten up your character, but I don't think it's going to be enough," he told her. "None of this has anything to do with why you did what you did before Oceanic 815, and Glazebrook will bear down on that in her closing. Which means we're here."

"You want to put me on the stand."

"I need somebody to rebut the marshal's charges and your mother's testimony," Alan admitted. "You're the only one who can explain both, and right now, I think the jury wants to believe you. They just need to hear you say it."

Kate was not a fool. "But if I have to testify, they'll want to know why I did all the things that I did. Glazebrook can cut me to pieces on all of it."

"That definitely could happen. And given the amount of charges and evidence that she has, she could keep you up there until she thinks you'll break." Alan looked at her. "I think what you've done is excusable, if not commendable. But you have to be honest. About all of it. Can you do that?"

"Are you going to question me about what happened on the island?"

Alan seemed a little puzzled by the question. "I think I've laid enough groundwork, so that going over it again would be irrelevant."

Kate didn't have to think very long. "I'll do it."

The next day, Alan questioned Kate for over an hour. He started with her relationship with her stepfather from the time she had married her mom. She went into a fair amount of detail as to the decades of abuse Wayne Janssen had subjected her mother to, how frequently she had wanted to run away, but couldn't leave because she felt that she had to protect her mom.

She'd been afraid Alan would ask the exact reason as to what had caused her to finally kill him, but he was clearly a better lawyer then that, and laid out the steps that Kate had been dealing with this level of abuse for so long it had finally erupted. He then asked her about when she had last seen her mother, and what she had tried to do, and then how she had learned from Marshal Mars that Diane had turned her in.

'Were you planning to face the music when Marshal Mars arrested you?" he asked.

"Yes. I probably would've had he not crashed his car. Maybe I should've stayed to face justice, but I saw an opportunity and I took it."

"Six months after Wayne's death, you returned to St. Louis?"

Kate frowned for a moment. "Yes."

"Why did you come back? You had to know the Marshals were watching the house."

"I had rid my mother of a husband who beat her regularly. I bought insurance to set her up for life. I did this knowing I would probably never see her again. And less than twenty-four hours later, she called the police on me." Kate was actually a little pale at the memory. "I had to know why. So I risked my freedom to find out."

"Did you see her?"

"Yes."

"What did she tell you?"

"She thought I'd come back to say I was sorry." The incredulity in Kate's voice was hard even for her to fathom. "She said that I'd killed the man she loved, and that I'd made her life worse as a result."

Alan paused. "Did she say anything else?"

"She said the next time she saw me, she'd scream for help." Kate nearly got weepy. "And the next time I saw her, that's exactly what she did."

"This was after she was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half later." Kate nodded. "How exactly did you find out what was wrong with your mother?"

"I received word from someone I had kept in contact with in St. Louis. I knew that the Marshal's would be looking for me, but I felt that I had to see her."

"Even given what she had told you the last time you saw her."

"I thought that maybe enough time had passed that she might have been willing to let it go. That maybe the illness had given her time to reflect on the family she still had left."

"So you made contact with Dr. Tom Brennan."

Kate nodded. This was painful territory for her, even now. "Tom was a doctor at the hospital where my mother was being treated. I had to beg him to get involved, he had a pregnant wife, and he didn't want to risk losing everything."

"But he got you inside the hospital."

"He found out when my mom was having her procedure down and got me past the deputies. She was still under a local anesthetic when I got there, which I can only imagine is the reason that she was quiet as long as she was." Four years past, the memory still stung. "I poured my heart and soul out to her. And then she started screaming. Tom tried to get me out of the hospital. One of the deputies shot at us, and." Now Kate was weeping. "I never wanted him to get hurt."

Ever so gently, Alan guided her through the next couple of years, briefly going through her relationship with Kevin, and the gang she had been with in Phoenix. He knew that Glazebrook would beat her up on that, so he told her to give a truncated version.

"When did you finally leave the country?" he finally said.

"In January of 2004. I figured that there was a possibility that the Marshals might stop chasing me. I hitchhiked across the outback, did a series of odd jobs, and finally ended up in a farm in Melbourne. The man who owned it was a codger named Ray Mullen, who offered to put me up, and pay me for an honest day's work."

"And he's the man who told the authorities that you were in Australia."

"That's correct. I didn't blame him. His farm had a hell of a mortgage."

Once again, Alan barely touched on her time on the island. For one things, her friends had already done a good job at laying the foundation about her character. For another, at this point, talking about the island would just be repetitive.

"When you returned to civilization, why didn't you stay and face justice?"

"I have no real defense. For a while, I really hoped that when the firestorm died down, they wouldn't prosecute. And for six months, it really seemed like I could get on with my life. But then, the DA decided to prosecute me, and..." She shrugged. "I did what I've been doing the last four years. I ran away."

"So why did you go to Seattle where you knew the press and the police would be waiting?"

"One of my closest friends looked like she might be losing her mother. As someone who lost hers a long time ago," here she fixed Diane with a dead stare, "I figured that she needed all the support that she could get."

"One last thing, Miss Austen," Alan finally said. "do you regret the things you've done?"

Kate thought about this for a few seconds. "I'm sorry for all of the pain that I caused. I wish I could take it back. But I take full responsibility for all of my actions."

"No more questions." Alan stepped back towards his table

Glazebrook hesitated a long time before starting. It was as if, having spent so much time trying to land her fish, she didn't know what to do now that she'd finally caught it. Finally, she got to her feet. "Your stepfather, he abused your mother for a long time."

"For as long as I can remember."

"Did he ever hurt you?"

Kate took a deliberate pause before answering. "No, but its not a lot of fun living in the same house, listening to a man berate and beat his wife."

"You lived in the same house as your family even after you grew to adulthood."

"Not a lot of money between a waitress and a drunk."

"Why didn't you go to the police yourself, after you turned eighteen?"

"The laws on how to deal with an abused spouse are very specific." Now she fixed an icy glance at Glazebrook. "But I don't have to tell you that."

The ADA finally got to the point. "Come on, you had a lot of occasions where you could've just done something to him. This took planning and forethought. What finally made you snap?"

"It wasn't enough for me to have to live in that house? Wayne Janssen was a piece of shit. Was I supposed to wait until my mom fell down a flight of stairs? Hell, she probably would've used her last breath to defend him." She shifted her look to the gallery. "She pretty much did that anyway!"

There was clearly no winning with this line of attack. Comparing Wayne Janssen's character to his daughter was always going to be a losing proposition. So Glazebrook took a different tack.

"If you really believed that you were innocent, why did you keep calling Edward Mars? There are records of you calling him a dozen times between your escape and your recapture?."

"I was trying to convince him to stop chasing me," Kate said slowly.'

"You kept calling him on the days of various Catholic saints. That's the kind of pattern we see only with a special kind of criminal."

"I don't have a trail of bodies following me."

"Just the two."

That hurt. "I didn't kill Tom. That was entirely the police's fault."

"You were committing a crime."

"Since when is it a crime to visit your sick mother in the hospital? Besides, the way I see it, if she hadn't screamed for help, the police would never have come charging in. I don't see you trying to charge her."

"Your mother's not the criminal. And she wasn't a fugitive. But lying to a police officer, that's a far more serious crime. And you misled Kevin Callis for nearly six months. Even married him while using an assumed name."

This was one of Kate's biggest regrets. She hoped that it didn't show on her face. "I never wanted that to hurt him."

"But you did do a significant amount of emotional scarring. You basically ruined his career, you forced him to resign."

"Your Honor, last I checked, my client wasn't being charged with being a liar. I believe she's already gone on record with them." Alan spoke up.

"I'm proving a pattern of deception which goes directly to Miss Austen's defense."

"I gave you a fair amount of latitude, Mr. Shore," the judge said. "I'll allow Miss Glazebrook the same. But you better come to a point."

"Actually, I did have one, your honor." Miss Glazebrook said. " I don't believe I've discussed the robbery in New Mexico yet. You infiltrated a well known stickup gang, the Six Foot Five. You began an affair with one of the robbers, you made a plan to rob the Albuquerque National Bank, you carried out the robbery, then you shot all three of your compatriots. All so you could open a safe deposit box there."

"Is there a question, your honor?"

"You were guilty of robbery, conspiracy, and aggravated assault. And in the end, you were lying to your fellow bank robbers. Just so you get what you wanted." Glazebrook walked closer to her.

"I shot them, because they were going to start killing hostages, Miss Glazebrook." Kate said stubbornly.

"You are a criminal, and a liar, Miss Austen," Glazebrook told her. "Given your track record, why should we trust anything you have to say?"

Kate took a deep breath. "What do you expect me to tell you, Miss Glazebrook? That I'm a good person? That I was the victim of circumstances? I've never pretended that I was a good person. But I've always been trying to do the right thing."

"A lot of people got hurt as a result."

"Do you think it would've been good for me to let my husband know that he had married a criminal? Do you think it would've been a good think for those bank robbers to start shooting people? Was I supposed to wait until that drunken bastard beat my mother to death? None of these things may have been the most ethical thing in the world, but you'll never convince me that I wasn't doing the _right_ thing, or at least trying to."

Glazebrook considered this for a moment. "We're not talking about ethical or right, we are talking about legal. And that is at the core of this case. I have no more questions."

After asking him what she thought her chances were before closing arguments, Alan, who had been nothing but honest with her, continued to be so.

"Honestly, I think the jury's going to hang. I'm pretty good at reading them, and I think at least three of them want to acquit, at least on the armed robbery and fraud counts.

"What about the murder charge?"

"They're probably going to acquit on that one altogether. We've already proven beyond all reasonable doubt what scum Wayne Janssen was. The charge that's probably going to cause the most trouble is the involuntary manslaughter in Tom Brennan's case." Alan looked at her. "I know that it wasn't your fault. But the fact of the matter is you pretty much confessed to getting him involved. That's enough for them to convict."

They were finally there. After nearly six years, they were finally about to consider jail. "What kind of time would I be looking at?"

"If she tries to go the distance, five to ten years." Alan told her. "If you want to roll the dice, and go to the jury, I'll let you. But even if the jury hangs, I wouldn't put Glazebrook to put you through it again." He looked at her. "I wish I had better news."

Kate looked at Alan. "When this got started four months ago, you told me I might end up taking a plea. I think now might be the time for me to take your advice. How are you at making deals?"

"I haven't done it as often as you'd think. I've made some great closing arguments in my time. And for someone of your caliber, it would be a doozy." Alan sat down next to her. "But I do what my clients ask, and for you, I will do my best. However, are you sure?"

"Glazebrook never asked what was in the safe deposit box I wanted stolen." She held up a hand. "There was no money or jewels or drugs. When I was twelve years old, Tom and I buried a time capsule together, One of the things that was in that time capsule was a model airplane that he was fond of. The night before" she swallowed, "I saw my mom, we dug it up. After he died, I kept the plane. To remind me of what I'd done. That's what was in the safe deposit box. It belonged to the man I killed."

"You didn't kill Tom Brennan."

"Maybe I didn't shoot the gun, but he was still there because of me. His son would still have a father, if I had just found another way." Kate was alarmed to find that she was on the verge of tears. "After every thing I've done, and everything I've been through, that's what I feel the most guilty about. Even now. That count of the indictment. See what kind of deal she'd been willing to make."

Melissa Glazebrook hadn't gotten as far as she had without being able to read juries, too. But she wasn't going to give away the store, either.

"Manslaughter 2, 2 and a half to 5, with time served attached?" she looked at Alan. "You must think I'm crazy

"You're never going to convict on Wayne Janssen's murder. And considering the nature of the victims in the robbery, you'll be lucky if the judge doesn't instruct the jury that you haven't made your burden. That leaves you with Tom Brennan, and that's a circumstantial case at best." Alan said smugly.

"Man One, Mr. Shore, five to fifteen."

"Have you heard me close, Miss Glazebrook? I've managed to get people who were actually guilty of the crimes off using just my summations. You know my track record. And the one thing you really don't want is to have another LA jury acquit a celebrity."

"You're awfully arrogant considering the evidence."

"When I'm done, the jury will throw Mrs. Janssen in jail." Kate almost wished he hadn't said that. Almost. "You've gone to a huge amount of trouble to prosecute this case. Imagine how bad it'll look if you come away with nothing."

Kate was glad she had never played poker with this man. She had a feeling even Sawyer would run scared against him.

"Three to six. That's as low as I can go to my bosses."

"You don't oppose parole the first time up. And she does it in minimum security." Alan told her confidently. "One of those nice ones they put Martha Stewart in."

Glazebrook looked like she might hesitate. "Come on, Kate." Alan made as if he was going to leave.

"Done." It wasn't until that moment that Kate realized how much Glazebrook was certain that she was going to lose. "I'll draw up the papers."

Kate wanted to talk with Jack, but she knew that the person who she needed to talk with first after she agreed to the deal.

"Got to tell you, Freckles, I never dreamed, after everything we've been through, that you'd actually agree to end up here."

Everyone who had been a part of the Oceanic survivors had been in the courtroom throughout her trial, even Jack, who was still working in Seattle. But the one whose face she had been most surprised to see every day was Sawyer's. Granted, Juliet had been there nearly as often, but still, considering all his past experiences, Kate had been amazed he'd shown up.

"How the hell did you handle it?" she asked him. Alan had told her about James Ford's time in prison, but Sawyer had gone into details as to why.

"Wasn't a picnic," he admitted. "But then again, I managed to get out of prison after just one year."

"How the hell did you manage that?"

He flashed that grin that had sent her reeling. "Take a wild guess."

"You conned your way out. How the hell-"

Sawyer held up a hand. "Story for another day." He looked around. "Anyway, it was a lot worse than where you're going."

"Couldn't be as bad as those polar bear cages."

He raised an eyebrow. "As I recall, you didn't have much trouble getting out of them when you needed to. Please tell me you won't get any more stupid ideas."

Kate shook her head. "No, its time to face the music." She took a moment for her next words. "So, you and Juliet."

"Been wondering when you would get around to that." Sawyer told her. "I know how you would like to think that it had something to do with you, but she makes me happy."

"Really?" Now Kate raised her eyebrow. "Cause I remember how sure you were she'd kill you where you stood."

He actually laughed at this. "None of us exactly make the best first impression, sweetheart." He grew serious. "Turns out there's an advantage to loving someone who already knows your secrets."

That actually stung a little, but not as much as it would've before. "You love her?"

"Same way you love the Doc." Sawyer said it so matter-of-factly that she really got how much he had changed from the man she had first met on the island. "Which is why I'm more than certain he'll be willing to wait for you."

"Three years is a long time." Kate told him. "Look what happened in just one."

"He's been waiting a long time for you, Freckles," he told her. "And there's time now. There's no smoke monsters chasing us, no button to push, no Others trying to kill us. The only one who can stand in your way... well, I think you've figured that much out by now. Question is, are you ready to stop running?"

It was a question that had been bothering Kate ever since she had had her first meeting with Alan Shore. It was the same reason she had gone through the mess of the trial. And now that she was finally face to face with what she had spent more than five years trying to avoid that she realized what she had been running _from_ all that time. It was everything she had dealt with in her past. And now it was time to deal with the future.

"Yeah James," she said, finding a smile crossing her face. "I think I am."


	15. Epilogue

**EPILOGUE**

 **Three Months Later**

"When I met Charlie, I didn't recognize him," Hurley was telling the crowd. "But then, he didn't recognize me either, so I guess we started off even."

There was some laughter at this. It was remarkable, considering everything that they knew about his past, how comfortable Hurley was in front of crowds these days.

"He was the closest friend I had on the island. I didn't know him as long as some of the other people here, but I knew him well. And despite everything people said about Charlie Pace, the last 90 days of his life, he was clean."

The barest of exaggerations, but for a fairly noble purpose. If he could speak to Charlie one more time, Jack thought he would approve.

"The Charlie I knew was a good man, who was brought low by a problem that has taken the lives of so many of our brightest lights. Which is one of the reasons that me and my friends have established the Charlie Pace Drug Rehabilitation and Needle Exchange Center. " Hurley waited for applause. "There have been many places my foundation has been responsible for establishing since I returned, but for me, this is the most personal, as well as the most important."

This was the first time the Oceanics had been together in public since Kate had accepted her plea bargain. Hurley had been working towards this for the past several months, and had actually been willing to try and go door to door to solicit the funds. He could've funded it himself, or gotten the majority of the money from the rest of the survivors, but he wanted to make sure that this place wasn't just another thing that was solely known just because of their celebrity.

It had taken Hurley nearly four years and a stint on a deserted island to realize that being a millionaire wasn't a curse. Now, however, he had a direction for what he wanted to do with his money, and that was to do the one thing he had always been good at: helping people. Inspired by the successful surgery on Carole Littleton, and after helping fund Kate's defense, he decided he would use his resources to help other people. So, after asking the rest of the Oceanics for donations, along with more than twenty million dollars of his own, he formed the Hugo Reyes Foundation.

The foundation was designed to help people in all walks of life. He had started by investing in the Santa Rosa Mental Institution and making what was a fairly low-level facility into a premier mental diagnostic center. With Sayid's help, he began opening a small institute to help people with Gulf War Syndrome. He had established a legal defense fund, and was working in concert with Jack at Seattle Grace to upgrade the Denny Duquette Memorial Clinic.

But more than that, he had wanted to do something for Charlie, the man who had done the most to save them from their island. So, with the help of Jack, talking in coordination mainly with Miranda Bailey, they had arranged fundraising for a heroin treatment clinic. Hurley knew from experience that going cold turkey wasn't the easiest way to get clean, so he had taken advice from people on the best method of treatment.

That part had been the most involved work of any Hugo's foundation, but the high school dropout was more than willing to get his hands dirty when it came to helping people. The groundbreaking was just a symbolic start, but Hurley knew enough about living in Los Angeles to know that having a lot of celebrities present was more than enough to guarantee publicity.

It hadn't taken much work to get Liam Pace to come up from Sydney. Considering that he had been feeling a fair amount of guilt knowing that his brother had only been on the plane in order to come and see him. Claire had been in correspondence with him, ever since she had returned to Australia, and now that she and her mother had relocated to Seattle to be with the rest of her family, she had remained in contact. It had been difficult to tell him what had happened without going into details about the island, but by telling just enough of the truth - Jack and the rest had agreed that he was covered because he _was_ related to someone very vital to the crash - Liam had managed to get through the loss of his brother.

Now, while Hurley was concluding his speech to the crowd, Claire had decided to do something she hadn't been able to do since they had met.

"Charlie always wore this." She handed Liam the square ring with the letters 'DS' on it. "I always assumed that it had something to do with Driveshaft. But the day before he died, before he helped us get rescued, I found this in Aaron's bed."

It took a long time for Liam to recover his ability to speak. "Dad gave me this ring when I turned eighteen. It's named for my paternal grandfather, Dexter Stratton. It was supposed to be handed down from eldest son when they became a husband and a father. When we were on our first tour of Sweden, I... I was in even worse shape than Charlie was back than. I didn't think I was going to live to be a husband. And Charlie had always been the good Catholic in the family. So I gave it to him." He swallowed. "Now I'm the husband and father, and somehow, this ring ended up back here."

And for the first time, Claire realized the significance of why Charlie had given it to Aaron. She had thought that she had managed to get over the loss of Charlie - the boyfriend she'd never even consummated her relationship with,. who had nevertheless considered himself Aaron's surrogate father. She was overwhelmed by fresh tears. So, for that matter, was Liam.

She tried to hand the ring back to his brother. "I think he would want you to have it now. After all, you lived up to the meaning of it."

"Did I?" Liam swallowed. "I was a shitty older brother. I got him addicted to that horrible shite, and then left him behind when he came screaming for help. I may be a better husband and father now, but Charlie's the better man. Now it seems he always was."

Claire managed a smile. "I don't think any of us realized it, until it was too late. That's something else we have in common."

Hurley was wrapping up his introduction of Liam to the crowd. As always, he tried to take the focus away from Charlie the 'rock god' and Charlie the human being. He wanted to make everybody see him as Liam's brother, not the lead guitarist. It was pretty amazing how sincere he sounded, considering they'd only met two weeks ago.

"And now, I'd like to welcome Charlie's brother to say a few words. "

In addition to his friends, Jack had invited George and Miranda to come as guests. Miranda had done a fair amount of the groundwork in helping get the clinic off the ground, and George had essentially become Jack's go to guy around Seattle Grace. Thanks to Jack advocating for him, George had retaken his intern final six months early. This time, he passed easily. He still wasn't leaning towards a specialty, but spinal surgery was starting to become a little more appealing.

Jack wasn't going to push him as hard, though. He learned enough from being in his position that sometimes you needed to wander in the wilderness a little.

George, however, wasn't just here because Jack had invited him. There had been some people that he'd been meaning to apologize to for the past six months, and this was probably the best opportunity he was going to have. Well, for some of them, anyway.

"Mr. Ford!" George wasn't that surprised to see him with Juliet Burke. Ever since Kate's arrest, Juliet had had several conversations with Dr. Montgomery about getting privileges at a couple of hospitals in LA, so that she could be closer to her friends. The engagement ring on her finger was also a good part of the reason why.

Ford, however, seemed more than a little surprised to see him. "Should I be looking for the blue and white?" he asked.

"That's actually why I'm here." He took a deep breath. "I know that I screwed up big time when you were trying to help Miss Austen. I just have this habit of doing the wrong thing over and over again."

"Seems like you were trying to help the cops catch a wanted murderer." It was almost painful listening to Ford say that. "Lot of people might even want to call you - 007."

George winced hearing the nickname that Meredith had given him. He was a little surprised that this Dr. Shephard knew what it was. "I didn't know what you and Dr. Burke were trying to do."

"Course you didn't. " The little smile that was perpetually curled around Ford's face was gone now. "Nobody bothered to tell you. We did a lot of that when we were stranded. Seems kinda weird, now that I think about it. Seem weird to you."

George was momentarily waylaid by the question. "Well, not really. I mean, at the hospital, none of us really talk about what's bothering us until it boils over."

"Yeah, but you're concentrating on saving people lives. The rat race of trying to be the best. We were on an island for three months, and it took us until we were almost rescued to start going over the basics with each other." Now he frowned. "Maybe that's what was special about the place."

Now George was lost.

"Point is, no one told you what was going on between Freckles and the Doc. My guess is the guy only spoke about the island when it came all over CNN, and then it was like pulling teeth."

"Actually, that's remarkably accurate." George shook his head. "I don't understand why you're not angrier. Kate Austen went to jail because of what I did. You and Dr. Burke could've ended up in prison."

"Whoa, whoa. Freckles went to jail because she was a fugitive and she came to a place she knew the Marshal's would be at. I don't know you that well, O'Malley, but I know Freckles pretty damn well. Second she showed up at the hospital, she was almost certainly going to walk out in handcuffs. The only thing you did was make sure it happened a little quicker than it would've." James said slowly. "And if she hadn't been arrested when and where she was, she'd probably be doing much harder time in a much worse place."

"You're not actually going to try and convince me that I did her a _favor?"_ George wasn't going to buy that no matter what James Ford tried to sell him."

"Fuck, no. Prison is a shit place to be in, and Kate had been trying to dodge it for longer than she probably cares to remember." James hesitated for a bit longer. "But she needed to face what she did. Really deal with it. I thought that she had while we were on the island. But I guess it took her until now to get it. So no, O'Malley, you didn't make her life much easier. But that wasn't what she needed."'

George had never thought that he would hear this level of understanding, given the magnitude of what he had done. Jack had managed to forgive him of what he had done very quickly, but he had honestly thought that Jack was just saying what he needed to say to make him feel better. Now, hearing this coming from James Ford, a man who according to Claire had cared for Kate more than anyone other than Jack, he began to feel a fair amount of relief for the guilt he'd been carrying ever since he had gone to the police.

"How is she doing?"

"Better than you'd think." James told him. "Better than I thought that she'd do, actually. However, I wouldn't send her any mail trying to clear your conscience to her." He hesitated. "Yet."

Suddenly, George was beginning to think that, after months of wandering in the wilderness - the collapse of his marriage, his ridiculous affair with Izzie - he might finally be turning everything around. Maybe now, things would finally be better.

Sayid was more contemplative than usual. He knew that Charlie was a hero, and deserved to be honored, especially by Hurley and Claire. But at the same time, he was thinking of all the people that had died on the island, whose names would never grace any public building, or even be acknowledged the same way that they had been.

More often, it was the first two people that they had lost that kept coming back to him, the ones he had delivered their eulogies within a week of each other.

Boone and Shannon. When they had returned to Los Angeles, and he had begun to settle in with Nadia, he had gone to see Shannon's stepmother and Boone's actual mother, who he had eventually learned was their only remaining living relative. Shannon had told Sayid in no uncertain terms that her stepmother had hated her because of the relationship she had with her father, and that was why she had been in Australia in the first place. Nevertheless, he had felt that she deserved to know what had happened to her family.

Sabrina Carlyle had barely been able to speak when Sayid had come to her. He had introduced himself, even though it was obvious to anyone in half the world who he was, and had told him that he had briefly known her family. But before he could get another sentence out, Sabrina had held up a hand.

"I don't want to hear it. My son is dead. And the woman who got him killed is dead, too. What more do I need to know?"

Sayid had known that several of the parents of the Oceanic survivors - his father included - were horrible people. But he hadn't expected this level of detachment from a woman who'd lost two children. "Don't you want to know how they died?

"I know exactly how they died. My husband's arrogant daughter got herself in trouble one more time. Her feckless stepbrother defied his bitchy mom, and literally went to the ends of the earth to bring her back. And they never came back. " Sabrina looked at him. "I've already buried my son, Mr. Jarrah. Why do I need to bury them again?

It took all of the restraint and the memory of the woman who, however briefly, he had loved to not reach out and demonstrate some of the moves that he had used on Henry Gale on this woman. But she had lost her son, and considering how much pain Shannon had been in when Boone died, he decided that adding to this woman's grief would do nothing. He had said his goodbyes, and left.

There wasn't going to be much closure for the other thirty-one people who had survived the initial crash, but hadn't come back to civilization. He wondered if there was anyone else who missed Rose and Bernard - it wasn't until he'd come back that he'd even learned their last names. Though she hadn't died in the line of duty, Ana Lucia's name had gone on the wall of slain police officers at the LAPD - Sayid had little doubt that her mother had had something to do with that. And would anyone miss John Locke? No one had come to the memorial for him. Had he had even fewer friends off the island than on it?

There was someone he was leaving out, and somehow he had a feeling that it was crossing Hurley's mind as well. When Liam had finished speaking, he hesitated even longer than usual.

"We're here to honor Charlie, and that's right. But before I let our final guest come on stage, there's someone who I have to mention. Someone who I didn't know for nearly as well or as long as him, but who was as important. " Hurley took a deep breath. "Libby, I knew her for a while. I knew that she was a therapist, and I knew that she wanted to help people. But I didn't even know her last name until I saw the passenger manifest for our plane. I didn't know how much she'd suffered before she got onboard, and I really wish that she'd have been willing to tell me. But somehow, even though she barely knew Charlie, I think she'd be behind this even more than I would. So I'd like to have a moment for Libby Smith."

There was a moment of silence. Sayid was pretty certain that he could see Hurley trying in vain to hold back tears - he'd had more personal losses than anyone else, with the possible exception of Sayid.

"And now, I would like to welcome a special guest to the stage. I'll admit, I hadn't heard of him until a week, but I have it on the authority of a very close friend that he's very good at what he does. Please welcome to the stage: Daniel Faraday."

There was a moment of hesitation, as this was not an audience very knowledgeable about classical musicians. But this was Los Angeles, so they at least were able to fake it for a few moments.

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I realize that I'm not who you were expecting, but that's all right, because you're not might typical audience either." There was a bit of nervous laughter. "So we're on even footing. Let me answer the question that's probably on all of your minds: why is a classically trained musician here to pay tribute to a man he never even met?"

Daniel looked around. "The answer is twofold. First, yes primarily, I specialize in music from many centuries ago. But I have always been a fan of Driveshaft. My final year at Oxford 'You All Everybody' was playing in every one of my dorm rooms. And maybe it was nothing more than synchronicity of time and place, but I always associated Driveshaft with youthful innocence. I've never been fully able to escape it, even as I studied Mozart and Beethoven. Even after the band broke up, there always some fantasy playing in the back of my head wanting to someday play their music. That dream died when I heard about the crash of Oceanic 815. I know how trivial that may sound given the immense loss of life, but sadly that is how we always tend to think about these things."

He paused. "The second bit of synchronicity came about eight months, when I touring in Italy. There I met two very special people. One of them was the woman to whom I am now engaged." There was a brief moment of applause. "Sorry to embarrass you, Charlotte, but you had to know this was coming."

Sayid looked around, and sure enough, the attractive redhead that he had met in Rome was there too.

"I had the good fortune to meet with another survivor of the crash, Sayid Jarrah, and his lovely wife, Nadia. We had a very pleasant dinner, in which I spent most of the time trying to avoid the fact that I recognized him. Eventually, I admitted as much to him, and he was nice enough to be understanding when I told him. Among the many things we discussed was the fact that I would be touring America as of a month ago, and he told me he would be glad to attend one of my concerts."

"It was then I had the great fortune to meet Hugo, and the rest as my girlfriend would say, is history." By now, they had wheeled his piano on stage. "I realize that many of you still may wonder how a classical musician can play perfect tribute to Charlie Pace. It is now that I will share a personal secret. Despite the fact that 'You All Everybody' got them to the top of the charts, my favorite song on their first album was a love ballad on the B Side. I think it comes a lot closer to approaching the musical genius that was Charlie Pace, and more importantly, I think that it does a much better job of describing the man that Hugo and the rest of the people on this stage knew and loved. So, I hope that you will indulge me in my rendition of "Love is Easy."

As Jack listened to Faraday begin his recital, he began to realize that for the first time in a long time, he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. He was beginning to feel more at peace then he'd been in years.

He felt a little guilty about that, but it seemed to be more residual from everything he had been through, rather than anything in particular. The island had taken a lot from him, but it also managed to give back a lot. He had finally found that he had a bigger family than he had thought. He had more friends than he ever had in his entire life. And after all of the angst that had been going on with Kate, he thought that there might actually be a chance that things would work out.

He'd gone to see her every week since she'd accepted her plea bargain, and he wrote a letter for her twice a week. Weber had been very understanding, given everything that he'd been through, and he was determined, now that they had a second chance, he would be damned if he would do anything to lose her again. Two and a half years sounded like an eternity, until you considered all the time they had spent getting there.

Though Sayid and Hurley didn't know it - though neither would've been that surprised to know - Jack thought about the ones they'd left behind a fair amount to. Boone and Ana Lucia filled his thoughts every so often. But he had gotten to the point that he was able to think less about the ones they'd lost, and more about the ones that had come back. He thought they'd want that, too. What was that line? 'Death is for the living, and for the dead not so much. He almost smiled at that. You'd think that all his years as a surgeon, he'd have learned that lesson by now.

"Jack!"

Now there was a sound that was the cause for good news. "I was wondering where you were, Walt." he said cheerfully.

Considering everything that he had been through over the last couple of years, Walt was doing a lot better. The therapy that he was undergoing with Dr. Skoda was very helpful, but the big relief had come from his father's trial. By finally putting everything on the table on all sides, a lot of the burden that Walt had been carrying since he had gotten back to the mainland was finally off his shoulders. He had managed to forgive his father, and more importantly, being around his friends was doing as much good as talking with a reputable shrink. A month ago, Skoda had said Walt could be released back into the care of his grandmother, who had been more than willing to allow Hurley to act as a co-guardian of the boy until Michael got back in the picture.

It had been a bit easier to establish a story for Walt that hadn't risked a lot of exposure. He and Michael had been in the tail section of the plane, which had crashed in the ocean on a smaller island just offshore of the ones the Oceanics had crashed on. Most of the passengers had died or succumbed after several days, with only Michael, Walt and a few others surviving had survived.. They had spent the next few weeks, doing everything they could to survive. After three weeks, using some of the recovered parts from the plane, they had managed to build a raft, which they had launched in November. After a week at sea, they had managed to encounter a fishing vessel, which they had managed to get them back to Tahiti, which was where Michael and Walt had managed to actually end up after sailing on the boat that the Others had given them. They had eventually gotten back to New York, but things had not gotten much easier. Suffering from post-traumatic stress, Walt had to be institutionalized, and Hurley had heard about the boys case, through his foundation. It had taken some work, and a fair amount of money, but the survivors had both, and considering that Oceanic was at fault here as well, the same attorneys had ended up settling with the Dawson family as well. With the exception of Skoda, no one else knew what had really happened.

"How are you doing, Walt?"

"Better." The young boy took one of his pauses. "I still miss Dad."

"Its just going to be another year."

"You have any idea how he's doing?"

Jack considered lying, but knew about Walt's ability to see through deception. "Hurley still has his PI keeping an eye on him. He gets reports back every week or so. I don't know the specifics, but he hasn't tried to hurt himself since we passed sentence on him."

Walt actually smiled a little at this. "Maybe when he gets back, we can finally be a father and son. I think I'm ready for that now."

For a few moments they listened to the music. "Do you miss it?" Walt asked suddenly.

Jack didn't have to ask what _it_ was. "Do you?"

"I used, too. There was a time I didn't want to ever leave. I missed a lot when I was in Bellevue. But now, the more time goes by, I miss it less and less." He paused. "Do you?"

Jack thought a long time before answering. "You know, before we blew the hatch, John told me that he thought all this was happening for a reason. I thought he was crazy then, and most of the time I still do. But now, maybe there was a reason. Maybe the reason was so that I could meet all of you. Meet my friends. Meet the woman I love. I know how selfish that sounds considering everything that happened, but maybe that's what the island was really for."

Walt thought for a second. "You know what, Jack? I think I want to adopt another dog." Vincent, like quite a few of them, had stayed behind on the island.

Jack laughed. "Good. Just be careful who you let him play with."

They listened to the last concert Charlie Pace would ever be a part of, as the people of Oceanic were able to do the one thing they'd never really been able to do before they came to the island.

Let go.

THE END


End file.
